Power of Social Media for Business

Social Media - is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers (Source - Wikipedia).

Social Media is a very exciting medium offering a lot of ways to you as business owner, to engage the masses in marketing efforts.

For me, the new Web 2.0 acts as a social amplifier. This allows anyone to become a author (blogs), or a journalist or a actor(video) as well. In fact, during the terror attack in Mumbai, one of my friends (very bold I must say) clicked photographs and uploaded them on web even prior to news channels. That is also journalism. With this, one as a business owner has a complete different way of marketing.

The most important step is to leverage the powerful social media sites to your advantage as you get unlimited real estate spaces for free to establish yourself. Create profiles on the major powerhouses like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace and Youtube. All you have to do is participate. You can do this by having your own blog where you post quality content that is useful. Update your blog regularly and distribute them as feeds to your accounts on other major social media sites. My boss does that everyday (emergic.org)! Users can add these feeds and view them in their news reader of choice.

A big mistake that happens many a times is people create these web properties and do not update them or maintain them. (I feel rather ashamed to say but I did that for my blog too). The strongest aspect of social media is its virality, news spreads here with word of mouth. If your offering have value, the best way to market the same is via Social Media !