Since Social Media is one of the things I do on a daily basis as part of my internet marketing strategy, I often get asked by friends and family:
What is Social Media? How do you do it? What are the benefits?
Lets run through the what, why and how of Social Media below:
What Is Social Media
In basic terms, Social Media is simply people having conversations online. In most cases, you have the ability to choose who you want to converse with, these can be people you already know or complete strangers who you choose to start an online conversation with.
There are many social sites online for you to become involved in, two of the major ones you may have heard of (if you haven’t had your head stuck in the sand!) are Facebook and Twitter.
Both of these sites have become absolutely huge worldwide as they both make it simple to keep up with what your contacts are doing and also the ability to broadcast your message (being personal or promotional) whenever you like to your select group of online friends.
How Do You Do It
Depending on which social media site you are using, there will be different ways and methods of using their services, however, a lot of them are very similar as far as the basics go.
In a nutshell, the basics of using social media sites goes like this:
- Sign up to become a member of your chosen site.
- Find your friends, family and other users whom you find interesting.
- Request to become “online friends” with them.
- If they choose, they can then add you to their contacts.
- If they add you, you will now be mutual friends.
- Now when you post status updates, all of your mutual friends will see your message.
By regularly updating your status and providing informative and interesting posts, you will find that more and more people will choose to “friend” you.
The Benefits Of Social Media
Being an active member of your social site is a great way to build a large amount of followers who will see your posts, which is great if you are using social media for promotion, or even just for fun.
Here are some of the benefits of using Social Media:
- It’s free (apart from your time).
- It can be fun.
- You can make more friends.
- You can promote yourself.
- You can promote your brand.
- You can promote your website or affiliate products.
- You can get word out about an upcoming product launch….and much more!
Interesting Social Media Statistics
- 3 out of 4 people in the U.S. use social technology.
- 66% of global internet users visit social networking sites.
- Visiting social sites is the 4th most popular online activity (ahead of even emails).
- Time spent globally on social sites equates to 10% of total internet usage.
- 13 hours of video content is uploaded to Youtube every minute.
- 100 million Youtube videos are viewed online each day
- 3.6 billion photos have been uploaded to Flickr (as of June 2009)
- The monthly growth rate of Twitter users from Jan-Feb 2009 was 1309%
- The average number of “tweets” on Twitter per day is 3 million.
- 5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook by users each day.
- 1 billion links, photos, blog posts and notes etc. are shared on Facebook each week.
Now that we have mobile gadgets like the iPhone and Blackberry, social media has never been easier to participate in. These types of services are becoming an effective weapon for our social media activities, as we can use them to effectively broadcast our message to an unlimited amount of viewers, while we do the things we enjoy doing (like sitting on the beach!).
There are also plenty of services available like socialoomph for Twitter that give us the ability to set up auto-updates while we are busy or even asleep, so there is no reason for you not to participate….getting excited yet?
So as you can see, the power of social media is huge and there are loads of benefits from becoming involved. Hopefully now, if someone asks you “What Is Social Media” you will be able to explain it to them. You never know, maybe they too will become involved and enjoy it as much as I do.
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Year Of The Rat
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All in all, a pretty good post. Interesting STATS on social media and your list of business benefits is a good tickler to prompt one to get the SMM mix in place. I noticed you also made your readers aware that Tweetlater is now Social OoMPH which tells me you are on top of your game, which is a good thing! — Neil
Hi Neil
We appreciate the observation. Thanks for coming along.
Social Media is being used more than mainstream advertising mediums by Company’s who have an online presence. It way less expensive too!
Dragon´s last blog ..How To Use Google Reader
Hi Rat,
Social Media is an incredibly powerful tool for internet marketers. It really gives you an easy way to share your content around.
Internet Marketing is a team sport and with Social Media you have the opportunity to network and build relationships with like-minded people. People who will share your stuff in return for you sharing theirs.
It really pays off when you invest time in building these relationships and it’s something I’m only starting to get the hang of now.
Jazz Salinger´s last blog ..Finding Your Passion