 Welcome to Social Media Strategist. My name is Debbie Fierst and I'll be your instructor. I've been working with social media platforms since they were first introduced. Every day, I consult with small businesses all the way through corporate Fortune 500 organizations as they work to create successful social media programs inside of their organization. During this course, I hope to help you make your social media endeavor successful as well. Let's start by defining social media. When we talk about social media, we're referring to any form of electronic communication like websites through which users create online communities and relationships and share all sorts of information from personal messages, ideas, news, images, videos, any type of content. And there are hundreds of social media sites, but they tend to fall into some broad categories. The categories that we're going to look at are currently defined as the most common types of social media sites. However, there are additional types of social media sites that we're not going to be focusing on. For instance, there are social gaming sites and virtual worlds. This is where people do everything from role-playing games to playing poker, multiplayer online world games, a simulated environment, and there we do see people sharing information and we do see them building relationships, but we're going to be focusing on the types of social media sites that apply most in the business world. So let's start by defining blogs. A blog is where an author will post an entry that could be anything from a news article to a personal opinion piece. And with that entry, they usually include images and videos. Blogs are an environment where readers can read these blog entries and then post comments and give their opinions on what the author posted. The most common blog platforms that we see today would be WordPress and Blogger. The second type of social media platform would be Microblogs. A microblog is similar to a blog, but of course, micro means small and so authors don't post long entries into a microblog. These are short status updates, often with a link to some longer content perhaps, but they're designed to be up-to-the-minute thoughts or trends. And a couple of common microblogging sites today would be Twitter and Tumblr. The third category of social media platforms that we see today are image sharing sites. This is where users upload, share, and comment on images. Two popular image sharing sites would be Instagram and Flickr. Another type of social media platform would be Social Networks. This is where members can connect with other people and share personal information, their interests, photos, status updates. Two common social network platforms would be Facebook and Google Plus. The next type of social media platform would be Social Bookmarking. Social bookmarking sites allow users to create, annotate, edit, and share actual URL bookmarks to other content on the internet. Could be interesting news articles, any links that someone finds interesting. Once these links are shared with the community, they're tagged and organized and sometimes voted on. Some examples would be Dig or Delicious or StumbleUpon. Let's talk about geolocation sites. This is where users note their location and this allows them to find nearby services such as stores or restaurants. So I let the system know that let's say I'm in Detroit, Michigan and I'm looking for a theater and the site will bring to my attention all of the available theaters within a certain distance. Not only can I share my location and find services, but I see other users' reviews and who is sharing information about that service. Another type of social media platform would be Video Sharing. This is where users upload, share, and comment on videos and two common platforms would be YouTube and Vine. We also see a category called Podcasts. With podcasting, users download and listen to audio recordings and content is often syndicated and streamed on a regular basis like daily or weekly. So you can follow a podcast of one of your favorite podcasters. Two very common podcasting platforms would be iTunes or SkyDrive. Now let's talk about social news. In this category of social media sites, members actually submit stories or links to news articles and other people vote on the value of the content. Two popular examples would be Reddit and Newsvine. And then finally, we have Knowledge Sites. A Knowledge social media site is where users post questions and answers and people vote on the best answers. Two examples would be Ask and Yahoo and people can post questions and answers about anything from technical questions to health issues. So these are the most common social media platform categories. But within these categories, there are dozens of sites. I'm only giving you some of the most popular. In order to understand social media, you need to have an understanding of each one of these different types. We'll be talking about some of them in more detail later. Let's talk about the evolution of marketing in general. In the past, and not that long ago, social interactions were primarily face to face. Your audience was local and it was difficult to scale beyond your local environment. All you have to think about is being a barber or a pharmacy back in the mid-century, 1950s, 1960s, even into the 1970s. People were focused on their local barber or their local pharmacy. People didn't travel and they weren't as connected as they are today. And so if you own one of those businesses and you were trying to market, you primarily marketed to people who could actually walk into your door. Currently, our social interactions are more virtual. The audience is global and because of the internet, it's easy to reach. So let's talk about the types of engagement marketing-wise that we saw in past generations. If you think about it, if you wanted to market years ago, you had to put up a sign on a billboard or broadcast over whatever your current technology was of the day, whether it was the radio or the television. But a lot of your advertising was done in physical print, newspapers, magazines, brochures, and things that you mailed to people's homes. We call that traditional marketing. Then we began to evolve into what we call digital marketing. As we became more connected and computers became a part of everyday business, people started to advertise in ways that reached beyond their local community. For instance, when email became popular, we had a mechanism to send out email blasts and you could start reaching beyond your local market. As websites began to emerge, you started to see people advertise with banner ads or little advertisements alongside of a website. And as people started to create their own websites for their businesses, they started to do things related to advertising on search engines. But this was not really as global as we see today. Currently, because of social media marketing, marketing has become very highly engaged. We don't just place a banner ad on a website and hope that somebody sees it and reacts to it. Instead, because of social media and how personal social media is, we have ways to interject and weave marketing into the social media sites that people visit every day. I mentioned blogs when we talked about the types of social media platforms. So let's say that someone has a blog about eating properly. And let's say that they're into paleo diets. If you like the paleo diet and you go to a blog every day and read about that, you might begin posting things about articles that you read on Facebook. And Facebook is a platform that businesses can advertise on. And as they begin to see that you have an interest in paleo diet, they can start to feed you very personalized advertising that might be interesting to someone who enjoys paleo eating. This is highly engaged marketing because these are personal relationship communities, networks. Not only are you targeting very individual needs and preferences, but you are beginning to have access to each person's extended network. So marketing has evolved from a very low engagement traditional marketing all the way up to what we see today. Social media marketing. What are the benefits of social media to organizations? Let's start by talking about an expanded online presence. Businesses have had websites for a long time, but social media offers multiple avenues for getting your audience to access your information, products and services. Ideally, you want to increase the number of links to your organization's website by posting news and articles, images and videos in all of these social media platforms that drive that traffic back. By having all of these different avenues, you can reach more customers. Another benefit would be building your reputation as a thought leader. Every business wants to be known as the expert in their industry. And you want to use as many opportunities as you can for demonstrating your expertise. Social media gives you a platform for posting articles, asking and answering questions and providing new insights and quality content that is going to allow you to gain a following of people who find you intriguing and helpful. Another benefit of social media is the ability to conduct market research. Social media platforms provide a plethora of information every day. People are posting their comments, their opinions, their reacting to other people positively and negatively. They are up to the minute responding to things that happen on television and on radio. Just sitting back and listening and watching would allow you to learn what is important to your audience and in turn, your customers. You can watch and analyze your competition to see how people are reacting to them and moves that they make. And based on everything that you learn, you can adjust your outreach and your marketing messages, become stronger in your own social media, perhaps even change some of your other marketing platforms, print ads, radio, television ads. Another benefit of social media to a business would be just the general increase of marketing, advertising and sales opportunities. As I talked about earlier, launching a targeted campaign to people who like paleo diets versus putting up a billboard and hoping that people who just drive past it, one or two of them are going to be paleo likers, that's very targeted marketing. It gives you an ability to be very specific in your advertising and social media is rich with those opportunities because you have customer profile information at your fingertips. You can reach audiences that have been completely unavailable in the past. The goal of social media in terms of advertising is to get people to like you so much that they become a fan or a follower. You might even be able to pull away customers from your competition. Another benefit of social media is the ability to just build brand awareness and brand advocacy. Now your brand of course is your identity, your image, all of the things that surround what you offer as an organization. And so social media is going to allow you to expand your online presence and drive traffic to your websites, to your information and as people read things that you post, like things and share things, that's going to increase your search engine optimization, the number of links that are out there for Google and other search engines to index. What you hope is that you're going to generate all of that traffic related to your brand into positive feedback and peer reviews and gain what we call brand advocates. In other words, if somebody likes your product and your brand so much that they'll post their thoughts about it on their Facebook page, they have become an advocate for you and that's free marketing. Another benefit of social media is the ability to improve event management. Now what do we mean by an event? It could be anything from a book signing to a convention. It could be that you're having a launch party for a new product, a ribbon cutting, any type of business related event. Social media gives you a platform for putting out your event details, updates, and resources that would be valuable to anyone who's going to be involved. You could post frequently asked questions, you could provide support, directions, and as the event takes on a life of its own and unfolds, you hope that the audience is going to like it so much that they'll share photos and status updates and give post event feedback that drives more traffic to your brand. Another benefit of social media is that it gives you another avenue to provide customer support and relationship management. You want to make it easy for your customers to gain access to technical support, information about your products, if they have a problem or need to return something, you want them to have a mechanism for getting the information they need. The days of calling an 800 support line or writing in to a company on paper are long past. People are already on social media, and so if they have an issue, they want to be able to take their issue to you on social media. This platform allows organizations to respond quickly, escalate issues when they need to be escalated, and think about it, you could post questions and answers in online help that clients can access 24 hours a day. Essentially, unmanned technical support. Another benefit to an organization would be to engage and motivate employees. This is something people don't commonly think about related to social media. They're thinking about their customers, but you have people who work for you and they want to feel connected. They too use social media. And so by getting involved in social media, you show your current employees and even prospective employees that you are keyed in. You're involved. There are benefits to working with your organization. You enhance employee motivation because they feel more connected.