A lot of businesses find themselves overwhelmed with the prospect of joining the Social Media realm because they see others reaping its benefits, but they are unsure how to get started.
In this series of posts I’m going to be explaining the bare-bones basics for those who need concise information about how to jump on the bandwagon with minimal time wasted (because, by the very nature of social media, it can eat up a lot of time). Let’s get started…
What Is Social Media?
If you haven’t already seen this video, watch it. It’s an excellent, simplified explanation of Social Media and its purpose.
In case you don’t have 3:44 to spare, Wikipedia (an excellent example of the use of social platforms in and of itself) defines Social Media as such:
use [of] Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.
How Can Businesses Use Social Media?
What does Social Media mean for businesses? I’ve found Social Media serves 3 primary functions for businesses. I’ll be outlining them in more depth in a series of upcoming blog posts, but just for now they are:
1. Customer Service
For Example: A customer has a bad or good experience with a company and discusses it on various social networks. This expands the customer’s influence from just a few friends to the whole internet, and changes their comment from a quick remark to a permanent log of their experience.
Businesses that actively manage these situations by harnessing Social Media and monitoring what the temperature of their brand is are able to quickly fix negative customer experiences and improve customer relations.
2. Brand Management / Brand Awareness
For Example: Two competing brands are trying to raise awareness within their target market; one uses Social Media and the other doesn’t. The one who uses Social Media has created more exposure for their brand by simply existing in the online social sphere.
By joining in on conversations that their target market is having online, they are raising their credibility and reminding consumers that they exist. Social Media effectively offers (mostly) free advertising. Rather than just having billboards and media buys offline (like company B), they have those in addition to online advertising and web presences. It creates one more way for your target market to find you.
3. Search Engine Optimization
Without going into too much depth, search engines rank sites based on their reach and influence on the internet. That is to say, if your site is visited often and offers a lot of valuable information, it is also likely that you are being talked about on social media platforms. Search engines take into account the number of references made to your site on social media sites (like digg, stumbleupon and delicious) and use it to help determine what your search engine rank will be.
Why is this important? Your search engine ranking is what decides how high up on the page you will end up when a query that matches your keywords is made. For example, if I Google “Public Relations” and “Vancouver”, Curve Communications is the 5th entry; this is considered a great Search Engine Ranking. The best, of course, would be the very first result (in this case the Canadian Public Relations Society).
What would be considered a poor ranking would be anything after the first page, because the chances of someone seeing your company greatly diminish at that point. Social Media raises the ranking you are given by search engines depending on how active you are and how much value you offer to users.
There are of course many more uses for Social Media, but these are the three which I intend to focus on as I find that for businesses they are the most useful and easily applicable.
What’s Next?
I’ll be explaining more about the three points listed in the upcoming articles, so stay tuned. In the meantime, if you’d like to view a more comprehensive explanation on Social Media and what falls under the term’s umbrella (for example: blogs, facebook, twitter, social bookmarking sites, etc.) I highly recommend checking out this Squidoo Lens (also a social media platform.)
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