A Beginners Guide To Social Media - Enhance.ie

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Apr 2, 2013 - Facebook users can create profiles, upload photos and videos and ... Facebook gives any business has the o
A Beginners Guide to Social Media

A Beginners Guide To Social Media

© 2013 Enhance.ie.All Rights Reserved. Phone: 01 8512800 Email: [email protected] - Original Material, Produced by [email protected], April 2nd 2013

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A Beginners Guide to Social Media

Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks. Source Wikipedia

Introduction When explaining what social media was to my Grandfather, the only thing I could say was “social media allows anyone to communicate with anyone else at any time… cheaply ! ” Back in the day only people in offices or homes, other premises or payphones could communicate in real-time, and even then, the communication was very limited. But today I can share images, text and videos and get immediate feedback from friends, family, peers or complete strangers. All of this change in the channels through which people communicate and form opinions present opportunities and challenges for companies, both in terms of navigating these new challenges to find the people you need to speak to and to manage your communications and reputation in an environment that often resembles the wild west. Here is a breakdown of the primary channels and platforms that you need to know about.

Phone: 01 8512800 Email: [email protected] - Original Material, Produced by [email protected], April 2nd 2013

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A Beginners Guide to Social Media

Breakdown Facebook is the largest online social network in the world, with

approximately one billion registered users as of early 2013, and is free. Facebook users can create profiles, upload photos and videos and send messages to each other. This means users share content from around the web and generally stay connected with friends, family and acquaintances no matter where they are. Facebook gives any business has the opportunity to engage and interact with prospective and existing customers. It is a platform that will drive traffic to your website and increase conversion rates. Integrate Facebook features into your site to allow users to easily share your pages & content with their friends on the network. Facebook is an ideal B2C marketing tool. Developing a strategy around multimedia and rich media content will allow you to get the most out of Facebook and the viral impact it can have on your brand message.

Twitter allows people to communicate with people using messages made of 140 characters. Follow friends, acquaintances or celebrities and communicate directly, creating conversations that are often intricate and complex with any number of other individuals from anywhere in the world.

With nearly 400,000 Twitter users in Ireland (~100,000 daily users [source]) and 500m global users (200m daily), this social network cannot be ignored. But the mere number of Twitter users is not the reason you should take it seriously. This system of sharing information is so efficient that it dominates the distribution and proliferation of NEW content, which is what search engines now monitor heavily in order to keep their results fresh and up to date. Users provide real time news or information using links from around the web. Twitter features can be integrated into your website including a “follow” button so people can join your community, a “Twitter Feed” to allow real time updates and provide fresh content onto the site (which will enhance SEO performance) and individual tweets embedded into your blogs so you can create articles based upon interesting conversations you contribute to or follow on Twitter. Phone: 01 8512800 Email: [email protected] - Original Material, Produced by [email protected], April 2nd 2013

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A Beginners Guide to Social Media

Often businesses use Twitter and Facebook as support services, both to push out interesting content and to communicate with customers who have had service issues directly, in tandem with expensive call-centres.

YouTube is more than the most widely used video sharing

application in the world, it is also the second most popular search engine, and is widely used for educational, promotion and SEO purposes.

YouTube is the easiest way to distribute video content online. Create a YouTube channel and produce regular informative or entertaining videos in order to gain followers. Then embed these videos into your website to engage your traffic more effectively.

Google+ is the latest social network, leveraging the power of

contacts within Gmail, Google search and other services to create a vibrant social network that informs its own search results. While the community may not be as rich as Facebook or Twitter, this is a crucial tool to enhance your rank and visibility on the search engine results page. The “Facebook for business”, LinkedIn has seen exponential growth in the past number of years, it is a valuable tool for having an organization or individual’s online profile enhanced and can act as an important resource for making online business to business connections. It is easy to create industry focused LinkedIn groups, which add a useful communication channel for the peer-clusters being developed around highly specific industry niches and communities.

Vimeo is an ad-free video sharing platform that is known for being the

best YouTube alternative. Your website would be able to stream videos directly after you upload them through your Vimeo account. Vimeo comes with a price of €159.00/year, but is ad-free, unlike YouTube. Vimeo will give online video a professional finish and give you the option to secure or gate it from the general public. We would recommend using Vimeo for instructional or resourceful material and YouTube for marketing or branding purposes. Note: Vimeo clips can be uploaded to YouTube. Phone: 01 8512800 Email: [email protected] - Original Material, Produced by [email protected], April 2nd 2013

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A Beginners Guide to Social Media

Pinterest iis a social media site that allows users to “pin” images

and videos they find online to a virtual pinboard and share them with others. It is designed to be quite visual and social. Users can create as many pinboards as they’d like, based on their interests, hobbies or other categories. For example, you might create a pinboard called “Bucket List” for images of people doing things you want to do before you kick the bucket. People can follow you on your pinboard and even “re-pin” content that they like, which adds it to their own pinboard.

Tumblr is a social blogging platform that takes many of the features

of Twitter and facebook and matches this with a classic, simple yet effective blogging platform like Wordpress or Blogger. Tumblr is particularly noteworthy for the fact that it is the most popular social network among people under 23 in North America, which is significant because as these users grow older, it may develop into a dominant social platform. Users of Tumblr tend to post their real interests to a very select group of people as the platform in their social circle or who share common interests. It is not considered to be an enormously useful platform for business purposes as of yet, but it is one to watch for the future as social networks develop in often surprising ways. As the YouTube for slide decks, Slideshare allows you to upload powerpoint (among other) slide decks to embed them in your own website. This is useful for educational or instructive material, as it allows users to easily browse a slide deck in the browser without having to download a PDF file. An interesting use of this tool is to create a private Slideshare account that works similarly and in tandem with a Vimeo account, showing video presentations and the related slide deck in the same page for easy consumption of material. An example of this presentation style can be viewed on InfoQ.com

Phone: 01 8512800 Email: [email protected] - Original Material, Produced by [email protected], April 2nd 2013

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A Beginners Guide to Social Media

No discussion about social networks is complete without mentioning

Blogs & Forums. In truth, the largest social network in the world is the internet itself, but the fact is that is network is distributed and de-centralised, which means it is not controlled or owned by one entity. The original means by which people communicated and networked online was through the use of blogs on forums, which, and these still form an integral part of the internet’s social infrastructure. They can be used to analyse market sentiment and generate leads, and as they attract people around highly specific niches, whether that means specific industries like direct sales or software or around political niche movements, social concerns or music genres. Using a tool like Google Alerts, allows you to search based upon certain keywords for certain timeframes through certain types of websites.

Social media is an integral component of any online engagement. It is especially crucial for brand penetration and brand awareness, but more specifically for networking and Lead Generation. The team here at enhance.ie has a vast amount of experience and knowledge in leveraging social media for business promotion and community development. It is recommended that all social media pages be branded in the same manner where possible. Read our white paper on social media strategy in order to further enhance your understanding of the benefits, processes and tools involved of developing your own social media strategy.

Phone: 01 8512800 Email: [email protected] - Original Material, Produced by [email protected], April 2nd 2013

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