Can Facebook help my business?
Social media has become a very valuable tool across multiple market segments and industries. The most important social media website for business has proven to be Facebook, providing the ability to interact directly with potential customers and garner powerful word-of-mouth advertising through personal referrals and testimonials.
There are dozens of social media outlets we can integrate into your Internet Marketing Strategy. The first step is to contact us and our consultation will help identify which outlets will be the best fit for you and your company. For those of you who want to learn more, you may enjoy the brief overview below.
The best way to define social media is to break it down. Media is an instrument on communication, like a newspaper or a radio, so social media would be a social instrument of communication.
In today’s terms, this would be a website that doesn't just give you information, but interacts with you while giving you that information. This interaction can be as simple as asking for your comments or letting you vote on an article, or it can be very complex – providing recommendations to you based on the ratings of other people with similar interests.
Traditional media can be described as a one-way street where you can read a newspaper or listen to a report on television, but you have very limited ability to give your thoughts and opinions.
Social media, on the other hand, is a two-way street that gives you the ability to communicate and interact.
Is Social Media synonymous with Social News?
It is easy to confuse social media with news because we often refer to members of the traditional news as "the media." Adding to the confusion is the fact that a social news website is also a social media website because it falls into that broader category.
But social news is not the same thing as social media anymore than a banana is the same thing as fruit. A banana is a type of fruit, but fruit can also be grapes, strawberries, or lemons. And while social news is social media, social networking and wikis are also social media.
Now that we have answered the question of what is social media, we can move on to social media websites. Because social media is such a broad term, it covers a large range of websites. But the one common link between these websites is that you are able to interact with the website and interact with other visitors.
Here are some examples of social media websites:
- Social Bookmarking. (Del.icio.us, Blinklist, Simpy) Interact by tagging websites and searching through websites bookmarked by other people.
- Social News. (Digg, Propeller, Reddit) Interact by voting for articles and commenting on them.
- Social Networking. (Facebook, Hi5, Last.FM) Interact by adding friends, commenting on profiles, joining groups and having discussions.
- Social Photo and Video Sharing. (YouTube, Flickr) Interact by sharing photos or videos and commenting on user submissions.
- Wikis. (Wikipedia, Wikia) Interact by adding articles and editing existing articles.
These are just a small sample of today's most popular social media websites. Any website that invites you to interact with the site and with other visitors falls into the definition of social media.
