How You Can Make Social Media Work for Your Business
Social media can be defined in a number of different ways, depending on who you ask. A general definition of social media is that it is any form of online publication, software or presence that allows users to engage in multi-directional conversations to share information, ideas and current happenings.
Social media includes blogging, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, My Space, Video Hosting sites like YouTube and can even extend to social news sites like Digg or Reddit. User interaction is really the key component of social media. Businesses will sometimes refer to social media as consumer-generated media (CGM).
For businesses, social media offers a new method of reaching consumers and has changed the way businesses are marketing and utilizing marketing campaigns. Larger percentages of marketing budgets are being allocated to social media and marketing studies are constantly being conducted into every imaginable aspect of social media, with results that are tallied, analysed and debated.
The difficulty in using social media from a business or marketing standpoint is that the medium itself is constantly in flux, always changing and therefore it becomes difficult to keep up. As a result, businesses can often find it difficult to figure out how to use social media in a meaningful way to build a customer base and expand marketing.