Understanding Social Media

Introduction to the course.

© Katugas. 19/01/2010

What is Social Media?

• “media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques.” – Wikipedia.

• A medium for communication – can be used for marketing, PR, customer support, etc.

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Importance of Strategy

• Why is your company involved in social media?

• What do you want to achieve?• How are you going to measure success and

returns?• = Need to have a strategy!

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Twitter

• Posts of 140 characters of text only. • Fastest growing social media platform during

2009 (>2000%). • Posts, @mentions, retweets.• Access through website and 3rd party apps.

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Twitter /cont..

• Content – vital to provide compelling, original content to gather followers.

• Use to direct traffic to website – need to give people reason to click on link.

• Tweets must be written carefully. • Link to twitpic, yfrog, etc; use shorteners. • Cross-post to LinkedIn, Facebook,

Friendfeed??

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Facebook

• Network with facilities for pictures and video as well as text.

• Friends – reciprocal relationship; Fans – one way.

• Groups or pages – which is better?

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Facebook /cont...

• Pages – eg Gap, Fox’s Biscuits – engage audience, can be important part of a campaign.

• Must be updated regularly. • Somewhat more conversational than twitter. • Linking to other systems – twitter, import

blogs, etc. Status for Tweetdeck?

© Katugas. 19/01/2010

LinkedIn

• Professional social network – profile is a CV with embedded references.

• Q&A and Groups – information sharing through discussions and posting news.

• Can be very powerful – find out about people before you meet them, and find others with similar interests.

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Blogs

• “a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.” - Wikipedia.

• Central hub, repository of news. • Demonstrate understanding of field, and

publicise corporate news. • Feed traffic to blog from other sites.

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Other Social Media

• Twitter, Facebook, Blogs – the “big three” – but many other sites:

• Video and photo sharing; • Location sharing; • Forums and closed networks; • Integration tools; • The future – google wave??

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Monitoring

• Social media is a conversation ...Conversation includes listening ...Listening properly means monitoring and analysis ...

• Especially as you need to find out where the conversation about your company is taking place.

• Many monitoring tools – eg google Alerts, MediaGenius, TechrigySM2, Radian6.

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The Course.

• Understanding Social Media course – delivered in 10 emails (correspond to slides 2-11 of this presentation).

• Price includes workbook (contains updated content and an extra section), and 30 mins. Individual tuition by phone or IM.

• To register visit: http://katugascourse.eventbrite.com

© Katugas. 19/01/2010

Nigel Legghttp://uk.linkedin.com/in/nigellegghttp://twitter.com/nigellegg07722 652866

© Katugas. 19/01/2010