WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA?

Social media is not complex. Humans have been socialising and building communities since day one. Often groups of people with similar interests would form in these communities. Social media gives us the ability to build communities online, casting the net further and meeting people we would never have had the chance to previously. A very powerful and amazing thing.

What makes social media tricky is the vast quantity of places to go on the internet. Finding the right community and engaging with it is a task most people can undertake, but simplest and most effective when undertaken by people who understand how the internet works

You may have heard of thing like twitter, facebook, blogs, youtube, social bookmarks etc. Some you may know about, some you may not. These are the tools that can help you in cast the net further and bring people with similar interests to you.

How can social media benefit you?

Whether you are one person with an view or an idea or a large company, you can use social media to engage these groups and communities to:

• Bring more traffic to your site
• Improve your search engine rankings
• Build your reputation as a quality brand
• Get opinions on your service and produces
• Get ideas for new products and services
• Promote events, product launches or special offers
• Gain valuable insight into product development
• Engage with your customer base and improve relationships
• Understand what currently matters to people, what are they talking about?

Meet Jane, she likes cooking.

Jane talks to her friends who also like cooking.

Jane likes to take pitcures of her food, she shows them to her friends. Some of them like them, some of them don't. Some offer advice and comments to help Jane improve. Some tell their friends about Jane's amazing food and they get in contact with Jane.

Jane heard about social media and how she could connect with more people interested in cooking. So she set up a blog and started to post her pictures and recipes.

She promoted her blog with tools like twitter and facebook and soon people started to come to her blog. They made comments about her pictures and recipes and shared them with their friends.

Jane also likes to shop online. She ordered a cake tin from supercakes.com. It was never delivered. She emailed them and they never replied. She was very unhappy and promised never to shop with them again.

Jane blogged about it and soon all of Jane's friends agreed that supercakes.com was a bad place to shop.

Now meet John, John works in the marketing department at supercakes.com. John had set up an alert to see when people mentioned supercakes.com online. He saw Jane's comments and contacted her

Jane and John had a chat and John apologised to Jane and explained what had happened. He even offered her a little extra gift to say sorry. Jane was very pleased.

Jane told her friends about the experience and they all decided to forgive supercakes.com. They told their friends and placed reviews online about the great experience Jane had. Soon supercakes.com was know as a great place to buy cake tins online.

Supercakes.com had lots more visitors and sold lots of cake tins. John got a promotion for bring lots of customers to the business, eveyone was happy.

This is just one example of how social media can help a business to understand what their customers are saying about them. Engage with their conversations and grow their business. To find out how we can help you do the same get in contact with us.