Social Media
Social Media is an exciting new world offering incredible opportunities to engage with the online public in an interactive setting. There is strong evidence that social media marketing is expected to dominate online marketing. A 2011 study by the Nielsen Group concluded that 70% of all Australian businesses intend to engage in some sort of social media activity. Though we know through experience the rewards involved can be hard to find. Use our strategies to make a productive use of the social media wave.
To find out more about social media, follow the links below:
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. As of January 2011, Facebook has more than 600 million active users worldwide, and is currently the most popular social networking site in Australia, with approx. 8 million Australian users. It's main appeal is how easily a page can be created.
Facebook is great for engaging people who like your brand / products and want to share their opinion with the rest of the community. Facebook Ads is also a good way to generate brand awareness and quick, highly targeted promotions.
It has almost become a "must" for organisations to be represented in this space. However, as many have experienced, being present in such a public online domain is full of risks to your image, and reputation.
A good strategy can lead to excellent returns, but it needs to be stressed that simply jumping in isn't the way to embrace this platform.
Twitter is a website, which offers a social networking and microblogging service, enabling its users to send and read messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page.
Due to the nature of the system, messages can be propagated to a wide audience at lightning speeds.
The rate at which tweets are being consumed by ones "followers" is quite staggering. Nurturing interaction between yourself and your "followers" are important to keeping yourself relevant.
As with Facebook, there are risks that need to be mitigated. There are numerous examples where a company/person inadvertently devalued their brand/image through tweet mishaps.
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos.
It is by far the most widely used video based social media site, and represents an excellent channel to quickly engage customers and demonstrate your social-media savvy. It’s relatively easy to construct your own channel and utilise it as a promotional tool, including the ability to allow public users to embed your videos on other websites with ease.
YouTube has also established itself as the second most used search engine, making it a very attractive proposition to be present on this platform. The negativity often associated with YouTube is high video production cost and bad user comments.
Google+
Google+ is the newest of the popular open social networks that take aim at FaceBook. Launched in mid 2011 it managed to attract 40 million subscribers by the end of that year. So very worth while to keep an eye on.
OI has been using it since it started and we like the natural integration with popular gmail, YouTube and other Google products. The biggest advantage that we can find is the ability to form 'circles' of friends or associates, in this way you can more easily target messages and updates to groups of people, like family or colleagues. Of course this can be done in other ways, but Google+ does it well.
PixelMache
If you've ever wondered how to sew your various social media initiatives together we have an innovative answer for you. Organise Internet has recently developed and launched an award winning solution that addresses many social media issues namely Pixel Mache. It's your own online video broadcasting channel.
Check it out at PIXELMACHE.TV Email info@pixelmache.tv or use our contact form for more info.