Social Media
TODAY’S INTERNET MARKETING
BEGINS WITH SOCIAL MEDIA
Get the full understanding of what Social Media is all about and you’re more than halfway there.
On this page, I want to cover the most popular Social Media Sites and how they work. Here are the top 8 social media sites you need to know about:
- Facebook: The world’s biggest social networking site. Members go to find other people who share the same interests or activities. You can build your own online profile and share different types of information with each other, such as pictures, videos, blog entries, links to other sites, and music clips.A good marketing strategy is to create a Facebook “Fan Page” for your business and encourage your customers to join. Then you can easily alert them whenever you have updates to share about your business.
- Twitter: A “micro-blogging” social network site. Members send each other short text-based posts of up to 140 characters. When you find members whose “tweets” you like, you can subscribe to their feed and be updated whenever they send a new message.
- YouTube: The ‘Net’s number one video-sharing site. Members share and comment on each other’s videos. You can post a link on your profile page can direct other people to your site. Also, the videos you share can help establish your reputation as an expert in your industry. For example, you could share a “how-to” video that shows your market how to solve a common problem.If you’re not the next Stephen Spielberg, don’t worry — your videos don’t have to be super professional. In many cases, a video shot with a regular digital camera will work just fine.
- LinkedIn: The most popular business-oriented social networking site on the Web. As of May 2009, it had more than 400,000 registered users. It’s a great place to find potential business partners as well as people who may be interested in your products or services.
- Digg: One of the ‘Net’s most popular news-sharing websites. Members post links to their favorite news articles and then comment and vote on the ones they like best. If you get a good rating on an article that includes a link to your site, you could see a huge rush of traffic overnight.
- Stumbleupon: Wikipedia calls this social networking site a “personalized recommendation engine.” Members can explore and rate Web pages, photos, and videos. When they hit the “Stumble!” button on the site’s toolbar, the results displayed are ranked based on your previous ratings as well as the ratings of friends and of members with similar interests.If Stumbleupon members give your site or blog a good ranking, your site will be showed in their results more often, which could lead to a surge of traffic to your site.
- Yelp: A popular review site where members write reviews about local businesses. If you own a local business, this one’s for you!
- Delicious: A popular bookmarking site. Members save links to their favorite websites or articles — just like the bookmarks in your browser — and share those links with other people. Members can comment on each others’ links. Every comment you write links to your personal profile where you can include a link to your site. The more comments you make, the more people you encourage to visit your profile page — and the more traffic you’ll end up directing to your site.
There are many, many more with a lot of similarities, although each one has a personality of its own.
I will be continuously adding trainings to this site that will give you the basics on how to use every popular aspect of social media that exists. So check back often for the updates, or better yet, subscribe to our newsletter and you will be among the first to receive these trainings as they’re posted!
