301 ways to use Social Media to boost your Marketing

by Catherine Parker
isbn: 978-0-07-173904-7

You may have heard the horror stories about social media. Conversely you will have heard the good fortune stories about people finding their lost friends and relatives. The question is – Does social media have a relevance to business?

The simple answer is YES. This book believes you can build brand and product awareness using social media, BUT it stresses you do need time and a strategy. Just joining Facebook isn’t going to do it for you.

So what is social media in a business context? It is web tools and websites that allow a conversation to take place between you and your target market.

Reported statistics speak volumes about the potential of social media, for example, during 2010 Facebook reached over four million users, Twitter receives around 50 million updates each day.

Social media’s accessibility stems largely from the scalable nature of the Web, as well as the fact that most tools are easy and free to use. So you don’t need special technical skills or extraordinarily deep pockets to run a successful social media campaign. The only real things you need to be successful on the social media scene are a good strategy and a healthy dollop of time – this I can testify to with my playing with different forms of social media over Christmas.

So how can this book help you? Firstly it can explain in simple terms the different categories of social media, how each can assist your business, key advantages, strengths, weakness and opportunities. One of the key messages is ‘use less rather than more’ and ‘take action’. The book also writes about linking the various social media tools to minimise your efforts. I strongly recommend this book if you haven’t got into this space yet.