Social Media & Networking
What is Social Media and Social Networking?
Social Media is information that is shared freely between humans online. This media can be text information, images, videos, audio, links and more. There are many different tools online to facilitate the sharing of this information. Some of the most popular and well recognised tools are; Facebook, Twitter, Linked In & Myspace with Facebook to date having over 500million current users (Check out the Facebook stats page for more info).
Social Networking is simply the act of informally communication with other humans online. Whilst social networking happens both online (through social networking sites) and offline (For example at a University or College). The terms has been coined in recent years in relation to the activities online. Social networking online can involve activities such as; reading someone profile page (a type of constantly update CV of your life), interacting with someone through chat, or message/mail facilities, joining groups that have been created for a particular purpose whether it be for community, political purposes, common interests, religious views, public figures, study groups, business and commercial groups, the list is endless.
How do I get involved?
To sign up to a social networking site online takes just a few minutes, with some requiring no more information that a name and email. Here is a small summary of the top social networking sites, to help you make a decision on if they may be useful to you.
Facebook – No.1 in the list for the biggest amount of users online, Facebook offers a huge load of features for personal and commercial use. In either case the main function is to setup a profile on yourself. This can include information such as: Your education – what schools you attended, what year you graduated, Where you currently work and where you have worked before that, your hobbies and interest, photos of yourself and places you’ve been. One you have a profile on Facebook you can start searching for people to interact with. These can be friends, family or people who share the same interests. There are no limits to how many friends you can have. Once you start adding friends, Facebook will start to suggest friends, based on your profile and friend information.
Micro-blogging platform Twitter, is a was of communicating short bursts of information with millions of other users on Twitter. It’s commonly used for breaking news, celebrity news and gossip. Twitter allows you to wrtie up to 140 characters of text and let all your followers see it.
For example: Lets pretend you are a famous musician and have just released your new album. You can hop on to twitter and say:
“Just released the new record guys, there’s some awesome tracks on it, we hope you love it, download it from iTunes here http://itunes.com”
You’ve just successfully tweeted. Now all your followers know the album is out and they can go and buy it on iTunes, filling your pockets with shiny coins 
We mentioned followers and you are probably thinking, “I’ve no idea what you are talking about”. A follower is simply someone who is interest in what you have to you, and by following your profile on Twitter, they follow your tweets and get notified evey time you tweet something new. Learn more here .
Linked In
Linked is another networking platform mainly focused at the business world. A chance you networking with other businesses and business owners, employees making useful contacts, exchanging ideas and broadening your professional contact list globally.
How will it benefit me using these sites?
The potential is enough commercially as you have the opportunity to start marketing to a collective global audience of over 1 billion people. There is also a peronsall social advantage as you may find yourself in contact which childhood friends and acquaintances you lost contact with with.
It is common now for a business to have a Facebook Page (Special profile page for your business) and a Twtitter accoun to tweet about your services and special offers.
What will it cost me?
Nothing. Well virtually all of time! Signing up of to any of the services listed above is FREE, yes FREE, it doesn’t cost a penny. However some of the sites offer additional premium features you may want to take advantage of, such as placing adverts on Facebook or Linked In, which you can easily do should you want to reach out to wider audience. With specific functionality such as targeting the ads to only be display to a subset of users (i.e. Men and Women between the ages of 18-23 in Cambridgeshire) these additional options can provide huge benefits and increased sales to your company.