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Social Media Marketing

It’s true the buzz phrase of the year is “social media marketing.”

Recently there has even been a new term coined called “social influence marketing.”

Are you still at a loss of what social media it is and why it may be important to your business? I understand, so let me see if I can bring some clarity and demystify the phrase that often causes business owners to get a headache.

Think of social medial like this – you enter a bar and there are conversations going on at each table. You hear one conversation about work, another about a brand new vehicle someone purchased and perhaps the other is a business meeting where co-workers are discussing the latest strategy in their industry. Are you with me? If so, good – let’s continue.

Think of the sphere of social media has this bar. All of these conversations are floating around. There is a lot of information sharing, opinions being broadcasts and relationships being created. Does that help?

Now, I want to show you how big these spheres are growing by sharing with you some recent statistics that were reported by Econsultancy. These statistics are recent, it will give you a glimpse of how quickly social media is growing and the impact it is having on businesses today.

  • There are over 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
  • One half of YouTube users visit the site at least once a week.
  • There are over 250 million users on Facebook and 120 million of them log onto Facebook once a day.
  • At least 30 million of the Facebook users access Facebook via their mobile phones.
  • Over the last twelve months Twitter has broken the 1000% barrier of year-over-year growth.
  • It’s estimated that there are 6 – 10 million global users on Twitter.
  • Tuesday is the most active day on Twitter, followed by Wednesday and then Friday.

Do you still think you can afford to ignore social media marketing?

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Social Media is NOT New

Want the truth? Social media marketing is new, but social media is not new. That’s right – it’s been around for years, just not in a platform that was easy to access or use.

In 1998 I wrote for The Mining Company (you probably now known them as About.com) on the topic of Internet Conferencing, or what I like to call Internet communication.

We’ve been communicating online with other people for over a decade. I had even created a directory of acronym and I know it’s surprising but we used acronym like LOL, ROFL, ROFLMAPIMP, and even BRB – amazing isn’t it? We’ve used bulletin boards, chat rooms, and instant messaging.  However, back then when you used those tools you were considered to be a “geek.” After all who is going to chat online with people they don’t know – that’s just creepy, right?  Wrong, millions are doing it today and we’ve just called it “social media.”

I always find it rather humorous to see people react to this phenomenon of social media and in the back of my mind I think back of when I used to teach people how to use the tools to communicate online using tools other than email. Now social media has become “socially acceptable” and there are millions who use this medium daily – thinking it’s new.

We’ve even started creating lists and awards – lists of the most influential social media personalities, awards to those with the most tweet, and the media swarms these outlets to find new writers, speakers and even performers.

Now, I will admit that back in the day it was not easy for those who marketed to get in and share information about their products or services and new social media networks have made that possible. I will also admit that back in 1998 you couldn’t get “social” on your cell phone – but to say social media is new is to forget the history of where it came from – it has matured but it is not new.

I just wonder how many of you that use social media today would admit that truthfully you were intrigued by the geekdom of chat, bulletin boards and instant messaging a decade ago. Were you?

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