Social media are where multi-directional conversations are happening in the vibrant online environment…it’s the “buzz” that drives traffic to – or away from – your product, service, or cause on the web. Increasingly, consumers are expecting that the organizations they support have an online presence, and that goes beyond just having a website…not only do search engines love new content such as a stream of blog posts, but the social web wants to talk about you, too!
A suite of social media accounts compliments and amplifies your online presence and efforts by opening more entry points to your organization, putting you where people – customers or constituents, current or potential – are already engaging with one another and where their opportunity to connect with you is most direct, spreading your good word exponentially farther, and giving search engines more opportunities to see your name.
To accomplish this, I like to use a rather concise group of tools. This approach is also highly scalable, meaning that as many or as few media channels as are appropriate, desired, or within budget can be utilized, and added or dropped as circumstances change.
Facebook and Twitter can be used as conversation catalysts, as well as direct people back to your website, blog, and even other social media channels. Facebook is more full-featured with the ability to post photos, videos, brief sharable articles called Notes, and more. Twitter lets you share anything you want within a 140-character limit…from links to new content, to travel updates, to burning questions or meandering thoughts.
YouTube is for video, and is the second-largest search engine in the world, second only to Google. A custom “channel” can be designed to have a similar look and feel to your website or blog for consistent visual identity, and videos of all sorts – from brief webcam snippets to recorded talks or seminars, to screen-capture tutorials or more polished productions – put a human face and voice to your message, and are super-easy for fans to share on their own sites and social media circles.
Flickr is a photo-sharing site with some powerful features and high sharability in social media. If it makes sense for your organization – if you’re producing a product, or traveling often, or constantly meeting notable people, for example – Flickr is a good tool to add.
Social bookmarking is a way to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. These sites often feature some style of rating system whereby the most popular items at any given time coalesce near the top, providing a sort of user-created global news feed. Bookmarking your new content (such as blog posts or press releases) on sites such as Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Reddit allows it to be seen potentially by millions of other bookmarking users…and by search engines.
