Today, I will introduce you about some different forms of social media because many marketers think about using this potential marketing method to marketing themselves, improve their customer relationship and may make people remember about themselves. Firstly, we should know what is social media.
Social media is the term that describes all the web-based software and services that allow people to communicate, discuss in any form of social interaction which included text, audio, images, video,etc.
Social media come in a wide variety of forms, but all of them based around the premise of interaction between people such as discuss, sharing and exchange content about news articles or blog posts, photographs, video, etc posed by other users in social media. There are plenty of social media sites out there, but we can look some of them below:
1. Social bookmarking sites is the site that allow users to save their favourite web resources (page, video,etc) as a “bookmarks” and users can also use tags to categorize and then share them with their friends. This site will helps users can access their favourite web resources from anywhere if have internet.
However, I think this site is not popular like before because most of website have as “share this” icons or share it directly on social network site.
2. Social media submission sites such as Reddit is quite similar with social bookmarking sites because the users can submit their personal favourite link in here. The addition feature is that the users can “vote’ to rise the rating of that bookmarks and there are lots of discuss and may also debate about the most likeable link.
So the marketers can find out what type of content or structure that lots of people like and then improve their site based on those reviews, comments to make the site become more appealing.
3. Online forums and discussion sites have been popular since the early days of the internet, anyone can sign up and start to discuss online about general or specific topics with other online users. For example, the steam forums discuss about game error or review about games.
The business can uses this site to get closer to their customer by checking the reviews or comments about the products/services and it also helps the business improves their customer services by answer the questions of customers
4. Media sharing site allows you upload their personal content (photographs, video,etc) and other users can discuss, comments and share them with their online friends, but you can set restrict access or access freely for those content.
For example, Vimeo allows their members can upload, discuss and share their videos with other members or Flickr do the same for photographs.
5. Reviews and rating sites can be stand-alone review site like Reviewcentre.com (www.reviewcentre. com) that allows users to review and rating about the experience when they use products or services.
Other type of review site is e-commerce site add review component like Amazon or review site that concentrated only in one industry like TripAdvisor (www.tripadvisor.com) that focus on travel.Good reviews can be used as advertising opportunities and bad reviews can help the business improve their services or products.
6. Social network site is incredibly popular and I am sure that you know or at least hear about Facebook, MySpaces, LinkedIn’s and Google’s new G+. Those sites is a place that you can crate a group of “online friends” with whom they can communicate, discuss or share about anything such as video, photo, etc.
Enormous amount of people use social network and the numbers are keep increasing everyday and the business should not waste this opportunity to get brand awareness from their customer and increase their reputation.
7. Blogs such as Blogger ( www.blogger.com) or WordPress (www.wordpress.com) is free and easy to use, so anyone can sign up and write review, experience or feeling about the product or services. Some of bloggers can have huge influence over plenty of people because their followers believe their review and it may affect the reputation of the business.
For example, Zoella who is a famous beauty blogger in UK and has enormous amount of followers. She often review about beauty products and most of her readers are female and all of they also interest about beauty. So Zoella think this is a good product and recommend it to her followers, then people may buy or at least consider about it when they need that product.
Overall, I think different forms of social media has different benefits and limitations. So if the marketers understand well about it and know how to using suitable form of social media that fits with their aims, then it will bring a huge success for their business.
Reference:
Ryan,D. & Jones, C. (2012) Understanding digital marketing: marketing strategies for engaging the digital generation. London: Kogan Page. 2nd ed. [Online] Available at: <http://capitadiscovery.co.uk/brighton-ac/items/1272776> [ Accessed 1st February 2016]