The term "social media" refers to Internet services that enable users to share and discuss information. This means everything from social networks like Twitter and Facebook to social information sites like Wikipedia fall under the umbrella of "social media."
From the perspective of someone interested in it as a business tool, social media is about generating word-of-mouth traffic, where influencers (and regular users) pass your links and ideas on to one another, proliferating them further through email to peers, links published in posts on their blog, or sharing content on social networks. Social media does two things, each by way of making new connections with other people and businesses:
Both equate to very similar things, because your ideas reinforce, support, and define your brand. What are some of the things you want to do with social media, and how do they help you?
Forget about getting links to your site out there for a moment. Relationships with the right people can get you further than links, and this is where social media is really useful: it puts you in touch with people. People who use social media are making themselves accessible.
They might not be easily accessible, but you still have a better chance of interacting with someone influential in this sphere than any other if they've opened themselves up to it and participate in these social networks. Tweeting your links might get you a few new visitors a day, but making the right friends can get your links far, far more than that.
If you're networking with the right people and publishing great content on your blog, undoubtedly a portion of your new contacts are going to check out your blog and become a reader.
There are a number of techniques people use to achieve this. The most common way is simply to share links to new posts on your blog as a status update or tweet. Some people opt to simply include a link in their bio and focus on meeting new people and engaging with them. This results in fewer clicks through to your site, but those who do, are more interested in you and what you do.
Of course, you need to be mindful of etiquette. Linking to yourself too often is equivalent to sending people spam emails, and the last thing anyone making a living from the web wants to do is to be perceived as a spammer.
Many Twitter accounts and Facebook pages link to new posts as they're published and this can bring in an influx of new traffic – it seems that many people are steering clear of the RSS reader these days, preferring to let their social network contacts dictate what they read through posting links and retweets.
Social media is good at directing traffic to your blogs if you use it properly, but I have to say that I've found that it's much more effective at relationship building – developing loyalty in your existing readers and contacts, and building credibility.
It's important to avoid looking like a spammer, and interestingly social media is something that can be used to actually build your credibility. You do this by taking part in discussions, answering people's questions and helping them solve problems. You give away some of your time.
You can do this through monitoring the feed of status updates and tweets from your friends, or the comments on pages you're watching on sites like Digg (though you shouldn't expect to get much intellectual conversation happening there), or you could reach outside of your existing network and use something like Twitter Search to find keywords and communicate with people that way.
There's always someone looking for an answer to a question in social networks and going to Twitter before Google is a practice that's being called "crowdsourcing." Instead of searching for information on the web, people search the knowledge of their network, hoping that this information (while not as immediate) will be more credible and irrelevant information will be filtered out.
Communicate with people and make an effort to help them, and your social media presences will help you – and thus your business – build credibility. As your sites become successful and your profile rises, you may find it's difficult to keep up individual communications with followers and fans. But fear not, there are other ways you can maintain credibility, including delivering useful content.
It's important to show that you're not only interested in your own content. You should certainly tweet links to your posts, but you should also mention any articles relevant to your field that you found interesting or helpful.
That phrase "relevant to your field" is super important. If you're an individual posting on a social network, fine, post whatever you're into! But if you're posting from your site's account, be reasonable and stick to the general area you're posting about. In short: share content. Make it interesting and helpful, and make it relevant to your field. By doing so, you deliver value to your followers and fans en masse, and this is a very useful technique for building your social media profile.
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Note: This article was sent to us by: Kenneth Wilson at 02172011
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