Having a website is not enough!
The days of relying solely on a website to drive
online business are well and truly over. These days businesses need to consider
other online opportunities to raise their profiles and build new business.
We recently completed an audit of potential
networks for a client and were staggered to find we had more than 40
alternatives to consider. Bearing in
mind this company could be described as your typical SME, it’s difficult to see
how they were ever going to handle such a workload.
One useful outcome from the exercise was our grouping of the types of social media available:
Blogs
Often forgotten about but still
one of the main ways to engage with audiences. Check out typepad, wordpress and
blogger
Micro blogging
Copy limitations mean short,
frequent messages. The best example
being Twitter
Forums
One of the origins of social
media and especially useful in specific sectors. Check out Web news and
discussion site webmasterworld
Social networks
The highest profile networks with
the greatest number of members. Originally the domain of the general public but
businesses have more recently realised the commercial benefits. Sites include
Facebook, My Space
B2B networks
Business orientated networks
often with industry specific groups. Leading examples include Linked In and
Xing
Sharing sites
These can be broken down into
sub-categories such as:
Photo
sharing sites (flickr, Photobucket)
Video
sharing sites (Youtube)
Presentation
sharing sites (slideshare)
Audio
sharing sites (audioboo)
Music
sharing sites (napster, limewire, last.fm)
Collaborative networks (Wikis)
Often referred to as the simplest
database available, Wikis rely on users to generate the content. Most famous is the wiki encyclopaedia,
Wikipedia
Social bookmarking
Allows you to store distribute
information via the web. Have a look at Digg or Delic.io.us
Review and rating sites
Often over looked but sites like
amazon were one of the first to encourage buyers to comment on products. Ratings and reviews have proved very powerful
tools in the past.
How
you use these networks will depend very much on your business, your products
and your audiences. Before starting out,
develop a social media strategy that also takes into consider your other
marketing and communications activity and your resource limitations. And finally
set some objectives so that you can gauge your success later on.
Over the next few weeks we'll be exploring each of these types in more detail.
