White Paper: Social Networking and Social Media
1: What is Social Networking?
Marketing has moved on from the monologue days when a company would push its messages to its target audiences and hope they would swallow it. Thanks to the Internet, marketing is now a conversation. People are blogging, tweeting, commenting on forums and Facebooking about brands, talking about their experiences. It is estimated that one in every five tweets – posts on social network Twitter – contains a brand name. If you’re that brand, you want to know what people are saying and establish how to make sure as much of that ‘buzz’ as possible is positive.
You will have had to have been living on Mars for the last few years not to have heard of Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Twitter. These are all online social networks and according to industry watcher eMarketer by 2013 50 per cent of UK Internet users will be accessing them at least once a month. For small businesses and start-ups, social networks offer an incredible opportunity to reach a global audience and be incredibly creative for relatively little outlay. They also enable you to engage with your customers in real time and monitor feedback on your brand, product or service.
On the flipside, they potentially represent a serious threat to your reputation if handled irresponsibly and, without strict policies on staff, use of social networks could result in the compromising of client or business-sensitive information.
Like it or not, social networks are here to stay and will impact your business. It’s up to you to make sure that this impact is positive. In this paper we aim to demonstrate the many different types of social networks, help you decide whether they’re right for your business to engage with, and also cover off how to blog, microblog and form policies on social network use within your workplace. We’ll even show you how to create your own online community!
