A brief overview of social media and its best uses for business

Facebook should take up a whole book on its own, but I’ll try to give a brief overview of how the online phenomenon that is Facebook works. The essence of Facebook is to connect your offline world online. You can add your immediate group of friends and discover that you know your friends, so invite them to join you in your network and also look up names of friends you have lost touch with. With Facebook, you can share content, post status updates on how you’re feeling, write on others’ walls, post photos to albums, and tag those featured in them, which will then appear in their and their friends’ feeds, too. You can become a fan or “like” brands, TV shows, music bands, as well as create groups. The power of social networking through the use of Facebook is enormous and should not be overlooked in an online marketing strategy.

You might think this is all for the user, but using Facebook advertising, which makes use of the persona information users give in their profile, makes Facebook advertising very targeted to the intended audience. A quick example of this would be if a user has on their profile that they are engaged, a local advertising strategy for a wedding cake service would be ideal. This type of targeted advertising comes at a cost, however for those who are willing to put a little effort into their strategy should consider starting a “page” for their business, once you have a page users can become fans /like your page. And when they do this, all of their status updates will appear in your feed, meaning you can continually market to them. A word of warning though: try to engage with them before you sell to them.

Twitter must be explained in 140 characters. It is a social network to receive “short and timely messages from a user”. This is not so much like a social network where you take your offline world online, as people often have followers and follow people based on their interests, and most of these people have probably never met. out of line. The concept of Twitter is to tweet short messages to your followers who have chosen to receive your updates and in turn you can follow others to get your updates. For businesses, if they can attract followers by posting exclusive offers and information about their stores, they have a free medium in which to market. Once you have a following, all of your updates will appear in your feed, meaning you can continually market to them. A word of warning though: try to engage with them before you sell to them.

LinkedIn is the original business social network. Through the use of connections, users can connect with those they have done business with before, with whom they have worked at different jobs, and build an online network of people in the business community. Again, you can join groups to further connect your network, ask for referral requests, and search your contact list to find someone who can help you. For help with online marketing, see internetmarketing.