The Potentials and Power of Social Media

For small business owners, it’s important to understand the power of social networking. Studies have proven that over 25% of the time that people spend online, they are using social networks. Out of that 25%, 80% of these users are looking for something to buy, and 50% of those users are making purchases. But the key is – they aren’t simply making purchases based on ads they see scrolling across their screens. They are making purchases based on what people in their social networks are recommending.

Now it’s important to understand that Facebook alone has upwards of 600 million users. Each of these users will have their own profile, friends, and groups of people they interact with on a daily basis. When someone buys something they like, they talk about it. Others read about it and share it with their friends and groups. This activity replicates over and over, and over again. Now, this analogy only illustrates one person. What if thousands of people were talking about your products and recommending them to their friends? Welcome to the power of social networking.

Many business owners are only beginning to understand the power of social media and using the social networks in order to get their products and services in front of this massive audience. But here is where the issues arise. In order to be successful using this powerful marketing tool, you will either need to understand how to use it yourself, or you will have to hire a service that can use it effectively. Using social networks creates brand exposure in ways never before realized. You can also use social networks for developing yourself as an authority on a specific product or service.

Whichever way you choose in which to use social networks, it will require a bit of work on your part to gain the trust of the friends, followers, and connections you’ll be making. Using the big social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Yelp will prove to be very effective in growing your business but it begins with building a trust. In order to do this effectively, you will have to participate in communicating with friends, posting in groups, tweeting on a regular basis, sending out invites and connecting, and posting information about your business on message boards consistently.

The power of social networks can be utilized provided you understand how to use these communication and marketing tools to the best of their abilities. If you need help in this area, there are social networking service providers that can help.

How better Social Media can be used further

Real-Life Benefits of Online Social Networking

• People can gain social confidence from interacting with other people online, which may help them feel more secure in new situations, such as going to college, joining a sports team, and meeting new friends.
• Because social networking—like everything else online—is constantly evolving, everyone can become more familiar with new and emerging technologies, as well as increase their media literacy through exposure to many different types of online media that are shared by their friends.
• Many people find support in online communities; this is especially true for people who have unique interests or feel isolated. Encouraging to find other people who are interested in the same thing or may be dealing with similar issues.
• Online communities can be very diverse and expose you to many new viewpoints, ideas, and opinions that she may not be familiar with.
• People tend to use social networking to augment—not replace—their real-world relationships, helping them learn to communicate in many different ways. Social networking is becoming an increasingly important method of communicating in schools and the workplace, so it’s good to be prepared to communicate through sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.
• Keeping in touch with family members that live far away can become much easier through the use of online social networking. By sharing updates, photos, videos, and messages, family members can stay connected even if the live across the country—or the world.

Uses of Social Media – recent incidents

1. Purely Personal Reasons
Easily the most common use of Social Networking sites, and the main reason for them existing in the first place, is for personal reasons. The majority of people using Facebook or Myspace keep to the “social” label. It is used for its original purpose – to keep in touch with friends.

Some people will go on simply to update their status or view their friends’ statuses, or to look at photos from the weekend’s night out. Some use it to connect to people they’ve met, a potential girlfriend/boyfriend perhaps, or someone who shares the same interests.

One great way of taking advantage of the personal side of Facebook is keeping in touch with people hundreds of miles away, maybe somebody who has gone traveling or moved to the other side of the world. In the past it would have been nigh on impossible to keep in touch, much less keep up to date with what they are doing.

A wall post on Facebook can work when a phone call would be too much, such as simply commenting to somebody that they should listen to a new song or making an amusing remark. It lets you have small conversations with people that you would not normally bother having if it meant a long phone call.

The people who use the tools for these purposes sometimes have no idea that marketing is going on, or that it is possible to use these networks for business purposes, and some even simply ignore advertising altogether.

2. Business – Connecting with customers
With the rise of Internet Marketing, social media is being embraced by businesses more and more. Innovative ways of utilising these tools by connecting directly with customers are being found.

Companies are seeing that the best way to conduct themselves online is to speak to their customers directly using these social networking sites, Twitter being especially useful for this. It increases the reputation of the company, gets them positive reviews and shows that they really care about the customer. It also gives a human face to the large corporation, meaning that customers or potential customers will feel much more comfortable coming back.

There are some great examples of this strategy online, with a company called Virgin Trains being one of the most successful. They have a small team of dedicated and named staff who run the Twitter feed as part of their overall PR role. Whenever a customer has a question or a complaint about the trains, for example – the train is late or something has gone wrong with their ticket, they post it on the Twitter feed and usually get a pretty quick response.

The response is sometimes a simple apology about a train being late, but it gives a human element to the company and this simple gesture could stop them losing a customer for the future.

They can also act as a sort of customer service line, say somebody loses the code to pick up their ticket from the fast ticket machine they will post on Twitter, and get a response with the information they need.

3. Business – Networking
There is also the opportunity for business types to network and expand their business on the social networking platform. This can take many forms, and take bits of each of points 1 and 2.

To get a deal is all about knowing the right people, and if somebody that you went to school with owns a multi million dollar business and your company do what he is looking for, using Facebook could have you onto a winner. A random friend request from somebody you haven’t spoken to since you were 11 years old could be the key to your company’s success.

Alright, so that might have been a slight exaggeration. You could expand your business through old contacts as well as new, but it doesn’t mean they will be the factor that leads to your success.

Social networking sites like LinkedIn exist for this purpose; for people to network within a business environment. It does for businesses what Facebook does for students and teenagers, it lets people connect. It could find you a new business deal or could even find you a new job!

4. Marketing
Another Twitter success story is Dell and their recent Internet Marketing strategy. Their outlet site sells refurbished PCs, and they post details about the newest ones on their Twitter feed. They also post special offers just for Twitter users, and they send information about sales, along with discount vouchers to their Twitter followers. The company has generated $6.5million in revenue from this venture.

This shows the power of marketing on Twitter. This sort of strategy works well for e-commerce sites especially as they can market to an already targeted audience.

People would not follow the company if they weren’t interested in what they have to say. Saying that the strategy works as an additional extra to the normal everyday operations, and not as a new or the only way of marketing for the company, it should not be seen as a guaranteed winning formula and is probably more suited to an established brand as they are more likely to get enough followers to make it effective in the first place.

It would probably not for example work for a company specializing in a niche product, or for a small non-established company.

Social Media Marketing is a trial and error business, so it would be advisable to put into place experiments and do a lot of research before putting all of your eggs into the Twitter basket!

5. Entertainment
Going hand in hand with the ‘social’ element of Social Networking, people sometimes go on purely for entertainment purposes. Myspace is a prime example of this, as many famous artists have been discovered through these sites (sort of sounds like marketing, huh?). Music is a big part but also videos, such as Youtube viral offerings, are easily spread on social networking sites.

The newest craze is on Facebook, with all the game applications that have appeared over the last couple of years. The most popular of these is a game called Farmville which has managed to acquire 72.9 MILLION users per month. That is a crazy amount of people to be playing a game about running a virtual farm!

Now, a site like Facebook has not really been discovered for many of the other purposes of social networking. How many bloggers do you see marketing, connecting with customers or even conducting any sorts of business through the site? Not many I’ll bet.

It is very important to know the different usage of Social Networking sites BEFORE implementing a Social Media strategy. If you get it wrong and target the wrong people you could be jeopardising your online reputation as well as any time, effort and money put into the project.

New Media Vs Social Media

New Media
New media is a broad term in media studies that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century which refers to on-demand access to content anytime, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community formation around the media content. Another important promise of new media is the "democratization" of the creation, publishing, distribution and consumption of media content. Another aspect of new media is the real-time generation of new, unregulated content.[citation needed]

Most technologies described as "new media" are digital, often having characteristics of being manipulated, networkable, dense, compressible, and interactive. Some examples may be the Internet, websites, computer multimedia, video games, CD-ROMS, and DVDs. New media does not include television programs, feature films, magazines, books, or paper-based publications – unless they contain technologies that enable digital interactivity. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, is an example, combining Internet accessible digital text, images and video with web-links, creative participation of contributors, interactive feedback of users and formation of a participant community of editors and donors for the benefit of non-community readers. Facebook is an example of the social media model, in which most users are also participants.

Social Media
Social media includes web- and mobile-based technologies which are used to turn communication into interactive dialogue among organizations, communities, and individuals. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content." i.e. Social Media are social software which mediate human communication. When the technologies are in place, social media is ubiquitously accessible, and enabled by scalable[clarification needed] communication techniques. In the year 2012, social media became one of the most powerful sources for news updates through platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Classification of social media
Social media technologies take on many different forms including magazines, Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wikis, social networks, podcasts, photographs or pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking. By applying a set of theories in the field of media research (social presence, media richness) and social processes (self-presentation, self-disclosure) Kaplan and Haenlein created a classification scheme for different social media types in their Business Horizons article published in 2010. According to Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein there are six different types of social media: collaborative projects (for example, Wikipedia), blogs and microblogs (for example, Twitter), content communities (for example, YouTube), social networking sites (for example, Facebook), virtual game worlds (e.g., World of Warcraft), and virtual social worlds (e.g. Second Life). Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing and voice over IP, to name a few. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms. Social media network websites include sites like Facebook, Twitter, Bebo and MySpace.