What you should be using Social media for:

• Market Research – To find out where interest lies, what people are talking about and what the gaps are.

  Sites like Twitter are an extremely valuable resource for finding out ‘what time it is’. As soon as an event breaks, public sentiment is immediately available and this allows you to adjust your content or application to meet those needs. You can do so with as much ease and accuracy as larger companies with giant marketing budgets. Not only this, but you can pose questions that provide answers which give you even deeper insight. Forums are more static but the content is more detailed and can also provide much more technical insight. Monitoring Facebook’s more popular applications can teach you what is being accepted and what isn’t working to drive interest. Bookmarking sites work the same way but since they accumulate digs, or votes over days and months, the view is more long term and wil help you to avoid the trap of developing and writing for a passing trend.

  Free Report: Ten Innovative Ways To Use Twitter For Business

  Free SAP Report – Six Mistakes Companies Are Making Today and How You Can Avoid Them

• Knowledge research – To learn new things

  Social media is rapidly evolving, one way to keep up is to read blog posts by established bloggers but in many cases they are commenting on someone else’s first hand knowledge. In addition, many of those posts are only riffing to get traffic and not necessarily providing new ideas. Social media sites help to weed out the ‘me too’ sites and point you toward what is really happening.

• Marketing – To promote yourself

  This is the most commonly talked about use for social media. Promotion for it’s own sake however only leads to spikes and not long term stability. At the end of the day, there must be a product or service on offer. To market in social media is to converse, educate and gently guide someone toward the conclusion that you are knowledgeable and worthy of attention.

• Forecasting – To predict the future

  Long term study of trends and discussions on social media sites leads to the ability to abstract out patterns in your niche. When this is achieved, more accurate predictions can be made as to where things are headed. These forecasts can be tangibly plotted as part of a curve leading from past events and your understanding of the dynamic in your niche

• Socializing

  If you are expecting others to be social on your site, you should have an understanding of just what those behaviors are. Your doing so adds value to a given network and inspires others to do the same. When this happens you, along with others are building a tool set that benefits everyone. To drop the work angle entirely and simply be fun also has value in the sense that others can learn more about you and your motivations for providing the product or service that you do. Companies are always talking about how passionate they are about what they do, social networks truly allow you to prove it.

• Building relationships

  With all of the techno-speak and intellectualizing going on it’s hard to remember that you can use all of these tools to build a network of support and people who value your contributions. Doing so gets you a stable base of people who can get you through idea blocks and long running spates of negative feedback.

• Making money

  This is important to keep in mind. It is easy to get social media overkill and spend too much time getting those good vibes. At the end of the day, your efforts have to convert to sales. Make sure that your model has a path to your offerings and that introducing them is a seamless effort. No one likes to be surprised by ‘The Pitch’.

Free Report: Ten Innovative Ways To Use Twitter For Business

Free SAP Report – Six Mistakes Companies Are Making Today and How You Can Avoid Them

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