Cynthia Inc Brings You Social Media Resources

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Social Media Building

What is Social Media?

Social Media (noun) : social media describe the online tools that people use to share content, profiles, opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives and media itself, facilitating online conversations and interaction between groups of people. These tools include blogs, message boards, podcasts, micro blogs, lifestreams, bookmarks, networks, communities, wikis, and vlogs.

Social Media (verb) : is the democratization of content and the understanding of the role people play in the process of reading and disseminating not only information, but also how they share and create content for others to participate in. It is the shift from a broadcast mechanism to a many-to-many model, rooted in a conversational format between authors and people .

In a nutshell, social media breaks down the walls of Authority, Hierarchy and Secrecy, and gives all people regardless of race, creed, culture, economic status, or education, the opportunity to share their opinion. More importantly, social media affords us all an opportunity to participate in robust discussions that will hopefully bring to light many truths and dispel many myths .

The impact of social media on business can be summed up in two words: Customer Confidence.

How Fast is Social Media Growing?

• Over 80% of Americans are using social media regularly – up from 50% two years ago
• In 2010 87% of all US companies plan to use social media marketing
• Twitter grew 1444% in the last year
• Twitter registers 18 million new users every year
• Time spent on Twitter is up by 175%
• Every day bloggers publish about 900,000 blog posts
• YouTube is now the second largest search engine
• Facebook is now the number one photo sharing site
• Social networks now rate second only to email in marketing tools

Social Media to Build Your Business

The adoption of Social Media is well past critical mass – 87% of US companies will be using social media marketing in 2010.*

Most companies are using Facebook pages, Twitter and blogs to communicate with people online.

While it’s vital to be present on these social sites, it’s just as important to have a place on your website where journalists, bloggers and site visitors can find and share your social media content. It’s time to upgrade your blog to a social media newsroom.

What is better for social media marketing — Facebook or Twitter or Social Networks?

There are pros and cons to all of these social media marketing platforms.

They each are based on different concepts…Twitter is like a massive SMS thing and Facebook is like a whole world (can be a scary world actually!) Social Networks are an even wider world where you can plug into anything and everything you might be interested in…with lots of company in your interest zone!

Social Media Marketing is like a journey — you can get there by plane, boat or car, etc. They all get people to where they are going but are used for different types of travel.

Twitter has the advantage of fast and quick posts with little clutter….and it doesn’t seem to matter that you are only allowed 140 characters. You can post your profile, your picture, your website, and your posts can drive people to your webpages or affiliate offers. It is more like a one-way communication where you just let others know what you are feeling or doing….it’s more of an RSS tool.

On Facebook, you can chat in real time, upload videos & pictures, make groups, fan pages, walls, albums, play games, and many more things, many more applications…it beats Twitter royally for connecting people and communication. Facebook is more like Friendster or MySpace….Twitter is much more simple (but still powerful) and is used more for business.

In general, you could say that Facebook is a social networking site and Twitter is a micro-blogging site….both are in different categories. Twitter is more for information sharing. Facebook is definitely stronger in the networking area. It’s best to use both at the same time. They compliment each other. I’m getting good results by combining both of them. My suggestion would be to promote your FB in Twitter and Twitter in FB to get more followers/friends when you don’t have a product/service to promote.

It’s becoming commonplace to highlight our tweets on our Facebook walls. With FB, we can easily promote our pages and create a fan pages and increase fan following and promote our business. Also fan pages can be great lead building / capturing sources and have a better track record of getting people to become loyal fans where people are less likely to follow through via twitter. However, it is not as easy to communicate with them as it is on Twitter.

You can also get analytics programs to help you measure the effectiveness of your Twitter campaigns, which is a huge bonus, I’m not sure if Facebook has anything like that.

Here are some average statistics: people spend 7 hours avg per month on Facebook, compared with 2-3 hours on Google, 2-3 on Youtube and 1.75 on Twitter.

Apples to Oranges comparison. I think the “Big Three” of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all serve completely different needs now. Facebook is for back and forth communication, while Twitter is a news aggregator for most people. Just look at how many people who are Twitter members who have only made 10 or 20 Tweets, total, since they joined. They are there for news, for entertainment, to find out what Shaq or Mariah Carey or Jon Stewart have to say. They are just “listening in” for the most part. And LinkedIn is all about business, not just an online resume anymore, but THE forum for all business-related topics and conversations. I think these 3 can exist quite comfortably together for some time. The odd man out? Google…

Lately Facebook has been faced with security & privacy challenges and lots of people are closing their Facebook accounts.

You watch. A new website will come out that will beat Twitter, Facebook, AND Myspace. Myspace is already slowly losing the race, and if you recall, it was THE HYPE for several years.

Now that people are aware that networking sites sell, they’re going to come up with ways to broaden the spectrum that the others have already created.

NOTE: You can now easily create your own networking site, and if you are interested in creating your own, I highly recommend a new software program that will instantly create your own networking site that you can monetize 5 different ways:

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