As someone who advocates for the integration of social media into the daily practice of companies and organizations, I find myself quite often faced with questions like “what is social media?”, and “how can we “use” it to promote our brand\products\services”.
There are numerous definitions for the term social media, and most of them emphasize the importance of the term’s preface – “social”. The essence of social media is the ability of people to meet new people, share information and to express themselves in a variety of ways. These activities are being performed using a constantly evolving repository of new media tools (such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to name a few) that enable people to interact with one another in new ways.
One of the most important outcomes of the increasing usage of social media is that rather than being passive consumers of media content, we are participating in creating it, and sharing it with others. In order to understand the magnitude of the social media phenomena, I would like to offer some staggering statistics that indicate how prominent this phenomenon is:
- YouTube contains over 100,000,000 videos
- Social media sites hosts 60% of Internet traffic
- Social Media sites are the fastest growing category on the web–doubling their traffic over the year 2008
The following clip illustrates this notion in a very vivid way.
Let’s assume that now we understand a little better what social media is, how can we answer the second question I’ve presented at the beginning? How can we “use” social media to promote our business?
To paraphrase on Kennedy’s famous quote, I think that the question should be what can we do for social media sites, rather than what they can do for us. I believe that any company that wishes to gain from participating in the interactions taking place in different social media sites should first consider what kind of added value her participation in this realm will bring to other users. Only by adding something new to this social environment a company can hope to promote their brand\products\services. This addition can be achieved by helping users to find content that is helpful for them, or creating new valuable content and distributing it.
Regardless of how you choose to promote your company via social media sites, the most important thing you should bare in mined is that people are not using social media in order to learn about your company. The first thing you need to do is to understand their motivations for participating in this medium, and only them you can start thinking about your place in this environment.
