Social networking untangled: New guide FREE from Simpsons
11/03/2011

If you were ever in doubt about the power of social networking, the headline news of the past few weeks should have convinced you otherwise: the uprisings across the whole of North Africa and the Middle East were coordinated by Facebook users, and the successful coup in Egypt was directly attributable to it.  If it can be that influential in world events, its power to move markets – or increase your market share – can scarcely be denied.

Indeed, any business that wants to maintain its competitive edge nowadays MUST use social media to survive, let alone succeed. The only question is how to make the most effective use of it.

The first thing to understand is that the world wide web mimics the human web in terms of making connections: every business person knows the value of ‘working the room’ or ‘networking’ at Chamber of Commerce breakfasts and the like. Social media expands and accelerates the whole process.

It’s been argued that there are only six degrees of separation between any two people on the planet. You know someone who knows someone who knows … Colonel Gaddafi or, equally, Her Majesty the Queen (it always amuses me, incidentally, that when any commoner marries into the Royal Family the genealogists always manage to link them back to royalty somewhere along the line.  Expect an announcement about Kate Middleton’s royal antecedents any day soon!)

Again, social media makes these connections more visible, and thus more accessible than ever before. The favoured means of communication with potential contacts is, of course, the blog (a contraction of web log), such as you are reading now.  And the content and style of the blog will naturally find its own audience and attract their subscription on an on-going basis.

As far as you as a business person are concerned, this obviously presumes an intimate knowledge of your customer base, their interests, ambitions, hopes and fears. The more closely you tap into them the more effectively you can establish customer rapport and loyalty.
Your choice of social network will also help considerably in reaching your target audience.  Business users tend to favour Linked-In and Twitter, musicians My Space, photographers Flickr, whilst the 16-35+ year old casual networker tends to use Facebook.

Then again you could use the scattergun approach. At Simpsons we routine release our blogs on Linked-In, Twitter, Facebook, Word Press, You Tube, Technorati, Bebo and many more.  We also do the same for our social networking clients, on the basis that the broader the coverage the bigger the potential returns.

From time to time at Simpsons we’ve issued various guides on ‘How to Brief an Agency on … Corporate ID’s, Public Relations, Website Design’ etc., and we thought the time was right to introduce one on social networking. The information given in this blog, and much more besides, is available in a  guide entitled ‘Social Networking Untangled’ available free from our offices or by post.

Alternatively you can download our Social Media Untangled PDF here.