Social Media… The Impact It Will Have On Your Business
Social Media
Is the hottest business topic out in business right now, and is affecting the way business is done in America. It’s affecting small, medium and large companies alike. It is affecting all forms of media from newspapers, to magazine, to television, to the Internet. It’s even affecting the way press releases are designed and submitted to media, and product launches, and customer service. It’s affecting sales, marketing, and P.R. Social Media WILL affect you and your business in ways we don’t yet fully understand.
Because of the importance of how Social Media will impact your organization, I have included a brief synopsis of what “Social Media” is to help your understand what’s coming your way.
Social Media
Is the combination of user-generated content with “new media” distribution technologies. It can range from information about your products to opinions about your political views. Social media can take many forms including text, images, video and audio. Popular social media mediums include message boards, blogs, vlogs, podcast, and wikis. Social media shares all or most of the following characteristics:
Interactive: Traditional medium is “broadcasted”, one-way communication. Social media allows and encourages two-way or multi-way communication. If allowed, users can post comments or feedback on your site. You can also respond to comment or further the discussion.
Community: Social media allows communities to form quickly and effectively. In the early days, email newsgroups were the preferred method of forming communities. Other mediums such as blogs and forums were either expensive or can only be created with technical capabilities. Social media mediums can now be created and formed without any technical skills or significant expense. Most of these social media mediums can be created for free.
Connectedness: Social media content can be easily linked. Others can quickly link your content on their site or vice-versa, thus creating a community with a wealth of themed internal and external information. With the use of RSS (Really Simply Syndication) feeds, you can also syndicate your content or have others republish your content onto their site. In order to republish content from traditional sites, you will need to ask for permission first. Utilizing RSS feeds of your content gives other website publishers advance permission to republish your content.
Why Social Media Marketing?
Traditional PR & Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing works! It’s changing traditional public relations and marketing strategies. Implementing a social media marketing strategy campaign will not only increase your audience reach, but can also significantly reduce your marketing and public relations campaign expense. Companies are starting to set aside portions if not all their marketing dollars for this type of non-traditional marketing tactic due to the success of this strategy. Some of the benefits of social media marketing include:
- Viral marketing
- Free marketing
- Linkability
- Search engine optimization
- Rapid community building
- Syndication of information
- Instantaneous results
- Influence media before their stories break
- Reduce or eliminate public relations and marketing cost
- Rapid response or communication with your customers
- Interact with customers
- Respond to issues and concerns rapidly onto your own and other network communities.
In order to understand or fully appreciate the magnitude of social media and how it will impact traditional public relations and marketing, here are some statistics of current social media mediums.
- The most popular wiki (Wikipedia) has over 1.5 million articles with over 1 million members.
- YouTube members upload over 70,000 videos daily and servers over 100 million videos a day.
- Technorati is currently monitoring over 71 million blogs.
- Myspace.com has over 100 million members and is attracting over 230,000 per day with half of the visitors being 35 or older.
Social Media will impact Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Ranking is based on a few major factors including but not limited to:
- Content
- Incoming Links
- Frequency of Updates
Based on these factors, social media technologies will play an important role in search engine ranking. Blogs make it easy to add keyword rich content that can be updated daily. Blogs can contain valuable information that can be easily republished through feeds, thus creating incoming links back to your site. Search engines are also starting to incorporate and even give bonus points to blog generated content via their results. Since blogs can also contain others news, opinions or general information, non direct keyword rich content can also be included.
For more information on Social Media or for an on-site company presentation go to my web site at www.LonSafko.com or click: lonsafko@lonsafko.com to email me.
Listen to Lon’s Podcast on Social Media mp3
Lon Safko
Innovative Thinking
