How Can Social Media Marketing Benefit My Business?
© 2009, Brandon Cornett. All rights reserved.
Many business owners don’t fully realize the benefits of social media marketing, in terms of generating awareness. So in this blog post, I’d like to offer a brief overview of how social media works, and how it can benefit your business.
Social Media Defined
When referring to the Internet, “social media” is a collective term used to describe a certain type of website where the goal is information sharing and user interaction. A static website merely publishes information for reader consumption.
A social media website, on the other hand, lets readers participate and interact in some way. In fact, on a social media website, much of the content is generated by website users (as opposed to all of it being generated by the site owners).
Internet forums are a prime example of this online interaction and user-generated content. YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Digg are also examples of social media websites. These sites have several things in common. For one thing, visitors can interact with each other in some way. Visitors can also add content to the website in some way. These are the hallmarks of a social media website.
How It Can Benefit Your Business
Social media marketing is the act of using the websites for some kind of business purpose. For example, if you create educational videos about your products and services, you can publish them online through websites like YouTube and TubeMogul. Other people could view your videos through YouTube, and they could also publish the videos onto their own websites. They can leave comments on your video as well.
Smart companies are using social media websites to expand their reach. That’s the primary business benefit of social media marketing — it gives you access to a huge audience.
Marketing Through Social Websites
Regardless of what marketing strategy you have, or what you’re trying to promote, I would offer the following tips for using social media sites:
Before publishing your own content through a social media website like Reddit or YouTube, spend some time using the site. See how other people are using, and find out which topics are the most popular. The same goes for Internet forums. Get a feel for what is happening on a particular website before using it for your own business. In other words, don’t barge into a room you know nothing about.
The key to success with social media marketing is to have something worth talking about. If you have breaking news or a truly unique product, people will be more inclined to talk about it. And you can use social media websites to light the fire. On the contrary, if you have nothing interesting to say, your message won’t go very far. This is where the research mentioned above comes into the picture.
Choose websites that match the social media marketing goals you have in mind. If you want to publish video content to a large audience, use YouTube. If you want to share some interesting news or content, use Digg and Reddit. There are hundreds of social media websites online today, and you can easily find a list of them through Google. Spend some time getting to know these sites, how they work, and what kinds of content are published through them.
A List of Social Media Sites
Like I mentioned earlier, there are hundreds of social media websites online today. There are far too many for me to list in this article. So instead, I’d like to offer a list of social media sites you might want to consider for business networking and marketing. All of the websites listed below have some kind of business or marketing application, and I’ve made some notes as to what they are.
Social News Websites
If you have company news that fits into one of the categories featured on these websites, you may want to use them to spread the word:
Networking Websites
Business networking is a great way to grow your business online. Forget about MySpace — it’s networking for kids. Here are some business-oriented websites worth checking out:
Video Sharing Websites
Educational and instructional videos can be a useful marketing tool, if you go about it the right way. Here are some websites where you can publish such videos:
I hope this guide to social media marketing helps you expand your business online. But there’s only way to understand the full business benefits of this approach — you have to start experimenting. Good luck!
This is a nice post.. even for the title.. it is very catchy.. I think the answer to the question can social media benefit my business is Yes.. Ofcourse Social media marketing can truly help to uplift your business. With social media marketing you are creating an in-depth idea of your business as you share it with other people.. Connecting and communicating are some of the keys in social media marketing that will help you achieve success. Looking forward to reading other great posts.