Why Social Media is Important
For Social Media Newbies
The internet began as an information sharing tool, sending mail and files over the ether between users (1980’s to ~2000's). Then smart phones appeared, and the iPhone revolutionized the way people used the internet and shared information. With the introduction of global telecommunications and “Mobile media” (which includes laptops, smartphones, iPads, tablets and readers, and more recently the cloud-based Chrome tablet and Microsoft’s Surface, a tablet/laptop hybrid), the internet became accessible from anywhere 24/7, and a slew of “apps” (applications for each of the new tools) blossomed with an exponential growth of users as well as web sites, new uses and new business opportunities. Today, if a business wants to be relevant, they must have a website, a social media presence and mobile capability (cel phone viewership rules the airwaves!). This is a challenge and an opportunity for businesses, because they need to harness the power and reach of the internet to get new clients.
“… social media depends on mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms through which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content.” wikipedia
As late as two years ago, one person could still manage social media for her business; today, with the surfeit of users and apps, small business owners are finding that they spend too much time on internet marketing, because keeping up with social media requires a lot of time. Social media platforms, like Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn are no longer the only game in town. There are virtual magazines, RSS feeds (article syndication), internet forums, web logs (blogs, many written in Blogger, Wix, Tumblr, ning, or Wordpress), microblogs (twitter), wikis (user-generated or crowd-sourced encyclopedias), forums, podcasts (internet radio shows), places for photographs or pictures (flickr, pinterest, Tumblr), video (youtube, vimeo), rating and social bookmarking sites (Delicious, and the use of tagging as folksonomy - or collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content). And, unlike television, which sets its own hours, each of these social media sites are "on-demand" 24/7, a real-time source of information for clients, employees, entrepreneurs and anyone else interested in retreiving information from the web.
Social media is hard to understand because its root value is relational, intimate, and personal communication, and therefore time-consuming and specialized, as opposed to the impersonal, broad reach of mass advertising. At the same time, social media has that global reach. The way you become relevant in cyberspace is by the quality and quantity of your relationships, the quality of your content, and the ways you reach and engage your audience. Each platform has its particular adherents, its particular language, and its particular raison d’etre, and you must craft each message accordingly.
And to make things interesting, most social media are streaming media, which means one person goes to their facebook page and posts a picture or a link to an interesting article, in a long line of posts that she sees chronologically on her timeline. Any friend who is online at the time sees it, but all who are not online might not see it (unless they interact frequently with that person, and Facebook's algorithm picks up on that and places their posts on your timeline).
Some friends set "Alerts" and will get an email saying you posted something new, so they can link to the post; others choose not to get links (emails of this sort tend to overrun your inbox). As Sree Sreenavasin, a social media expert, says, the vast majority of the time, what you post is not seen by a majority of your members, viewers or followers (members are the people that are in your group or are your friend; viewers are the public that see your posts if they are friends of friends; followers are people that like to read your posts but are not your friend, so they only “follow” what you post). Anyone truly interested in reading what you post will go to your timeline and scroll down all of your posts to see what they want to read. Everybody else is satisfied with reading what they get whenever they choose to go online.
So why is it important for a business to use social media?
Because it makes you and your business accessible in today's business environment; it is an immediate, easy way of relating to like-minded people that share your interests through a variety of platforms, to let people come to trust you, and a very good way to curate and archive information about you and what you do (I believe everyone will be able to see everything that I post, which makes me a very disciplined editor of what I publish, and so should you). You can also think of social media as a library of your work; you are writing your history as you post. With time, your clients will come to know you and trust you, even though they might never meet you in person.
Social media tools help you brand your business; explain what you do in an informal way, and build trust between you and your online community. It is like a game, in that you can optimize readership by Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which means you can 1) Index your content faster; 2) drive more traffic to your website; 3) improve your website's Google PageRank (PR) over time; 4) rank your website's individual posts and articles higher in search results; and 5) build a loyal following of readers and fans. But it is also a real business tool, because it creates a community that knows and trusts you, and therefore trusts your product or service. Lastly, all of social media is moving to mobile platforms, for iPhone and tablet use, which requires that all the platforms you use are optimized for each of them.
Social media is a step above advertising, because you have to give people value in exchange for their time, and have them keep coming back again and again. Cute slogans and catchy jingles are the old way of advertising; social media is open-source and personal. And you have to be transparent, because anyone can discover anything about you on the internet.(Witness the slew of political scandals spawned by sexual missteps on the internet).
So you have to know when to post, whom to post to, what to post, and how to best post it. It’s not enough to have a good Mission statement any more.
It’s about this time that you start to think that it might be too complicated and time consuming; too risky, even. And you could be right. But trends point to the fact that everyone is getting their information and doing their business over the internet and social media, and those that do not participate, lose out on the one bright spot in the dreary post-recession economic landscape (the internet has become the Wild West of the 1850's!). You have to decide for yourself if social media will work for you or your company, and how much of it you want to participate in; if you want to use it for local customers or global ones; you have to weigh how much time you want to dedicate to a steep learning curve, as opposed to how much time and money you will need to spend on hiring a social media manager to run your social media for you. You have to decide how much time you are going to devote to your 'brick and mortar' job, and how much to your cyber-space job. Everything in business, as in life, is a trade-off.
So this website is dedicated to discussing how social media can be used to help your small business, or hire me to do it for you.
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