This is a guest post written by Daniel Offer, owner of the Facebook Chat Instant Messenger Chit Chat for Facebook. Using Chit Chat for Facebook, users can send Facebook Messages from their desktop.
Despite the rapid growth in popularity of social media over the past decade, how social media can be used to create value remains a mystery to many businesses.
The aim of this article is to show you how social media creates value for companies.
What is Social Media?
A social medium is a website that disseminates knowledge or information. The word media indicates that there is more than one method by which to disseminate this information.
Why Should I Use Social Media?
Traffic - Social Media is one method by which you can obtain traffic to your website. If you consider that Facebook, for example, was ranked as the number one website in terms of traffic in March 2010- you can see that social media is an excellent way to increase traffic.
Influence –People are more heavily influenced by their friends or genuine testimonials. If a user of your website, product or service posts about it, or join a fan page, that will have much more influence than a cold sales approach.
Google – You’ll get back links from these websites. Although, many of them provide only “NoFollow” links they still some “Google love”. As such, it’ll help you in terms of search engine rankings.
Brand Loyalty – People that feel the desire to promote your website, brand or product are likely to be your best customers. Helping them to reinforce that loyalty will help you financially, as well as help get your message out there.
Perception – People want what other people want. For example, if in a close knit group of four friends, three people think your product is “cool” – the fourth is likely to believe that your product is “cool” too.
Interaction – Encourages interaction with, and between your customers to enhance their experience of the service or products you offer.
What Types Of Social Media Are There?
- Social Networking Sites – e.g. Facebook, Beebo, MySpace
- Social Bookmarking –e.g. Reddit, Digg and Stumbleupon
- Social Networked Bookmarking – e.g. Google Buzz and Twitter
This list is not exhaustive. There are many video clip websites, answer website, blogs and forums that would also be considered social media.
What Is Value?
Anything given that has an intrinsic worth or significance, for example:
Traffic – Customer referrals will help to create traffic, a proportion of which you should in tern be able to convert into customers.
Back-links – Back-links take time (therefore money) to build, and social media can help you create free relevant back-links – built by your customers.
Advertising – Social media can help provide free advertising.
3 Popular Misconceptions of Social Media
Numbers Are the Goal – Some marketers, for example, chase creating “Facebook Fans” pulling in favors, creating new Facebook accounts or hard selling the fan pages. Whilst no one wants to be the first and only Facebook fan for a particular product, having 1001 fake fans for a product probably isn’t going to help you that much.
Social Media Matters More Than Google – Google is still the best way to get targeted traffic.
Click Fraud – Click fraud won’t help you anywhere near as much as getting genuine referrals from existing users or customers to your page or product.
To conclude, Social Media can be an excellent and effective way to create value for your business if conducted correctly.
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- 4 Reasons Why Your Company Should Run A Blog
- A Recipe For Social Media Marketing = Co-Creation
- Everything You Need To Know About Social Media
