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What is Social Media? Why should you use it? And how do small businesses make it work for them? Gareth Edwards of VHQ Solutions explores how to you can make practical use of Social Media.
What is it?
Social Media refers to a variety of internet and digital technologies that allow people to create, capture, share and promote content. Content may be a bit of a buzzword – it’s shorthand for all of the different forms of text (from Tweets to eBooks), graphics, photos and videos that you can play with.
The tools and technologies that come under the Social Media banner range from the familiar such as social networking sites like Facebook (www.facebook.com)or video sharing sites like YouTube (www.youtube.com) to less well known tools such as Digg (www.digg.com), a news bookmarking site) and Yasni, (www.yasni.co.uk) which calls itself a people search engine.
We get excited about the new emphasis on collaboration. Most Social Media sites allow users to share information (say through referral) and many allow you to create groups or clubs to gather and swap ideas and information. You can even use tools such as Ning (www.ning.com) to create your own fully functional communities.
As we shall see there are lots of potential benefits for you as a business person.
What are the benefits of using Social Media?
People just like you are already finding ways to exploit Social Media. Here are a few examples;
• Maintaining a network of contacts
• Carrying out market research
• Collaborating with other businesses
• Gathering customer feedback
• Enhancing your personal profile ... demonstrating credibility, personality and expertise
• Improving your website performance ... optimising using keyword rich inbound links
• Promoting your business ... to targeted audiences and specific groups of people
Many SMEs are most interested in promotion to begin with so that is where we will concentrate.
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