Social Media - The Brave New World

What is it?

According to Wikipedia, “social media employ web- and mobile-based technologies to support interactive dialogue and introduce substantial and pervasive changes to communication between organisations, communities and individuals”. The websites of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are probably the best know social media ‘platforms’ and have become one of the most powerful sources for news updates.

Why use it?

Social media holds tremendous opportunities for companies looking to drive new business and increase revenue - but only if you first develop a solid foundation and understanding of what makes the world of social media tick. No matter how simple or complex your current strategy is, you will want to re-visit it on a regular basis and make sure you have everything you need to be successful.

Although it’s tempting to dive right into the various social media sites out there, you need to develop a social media marketing plan first. Creating goals and metrics will help ensure that the time and resources your organisation invests in social media are well spent. It’s important to have guidelines that structure your efforts and guide your participants in the right direction.

The flip-side however to social media is that there are major concerns about some social media platforms’ attitudes towards privacy and this aspect should not be overlooked: sites often have obscure policies about how they use your data and this makes a lot of people uncomfortable - many prefer not to publicise the details of their everyday lives to the world to avoid the scammers and trolls. This latter element is becoming a big problem: ‘trolls’ - users who abuse other social media users - are making the news more regularly every week, driving many celebrities and ordinary folks to stop using social media at all.

So whilst you might prefer to avoid social media in a ‘personal’ sense it still might be the right thing to do for your business. Let's have a chat to discuss the pros and cons. Contact us here.

What’s a typical plan of action?

It depends on what you've done so far! Despite the hype, many people and companies have yet to embrace social media - so the first step might be for NeoMarTek to setup and build a social media presence for your company by creating your Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn profiles. If you're already signed-up, a review and audit would be a good starting point.

If you do use social media, there is an increasing trend towards using social media monitoring tools that allow the searching, tracking and analysis of the multi-stranded conversations across the internet that relate to a brand or certain topics of interest. Such tools can be useful in all sorts of ways such as campaign tracking and PR analysis. NeoMarTek can help you understand what's right for you.