A Few Words About Social Media

These days everyone is talking about social media. Moreover, you have heard that your business should be on social media too, in order to thrive and even survive. Yes, that’s true, but before embarking on any platform or hiring a digital agency to take care of your online presence, it’s worth realising first, what social media is, how does it work and why on earth you should be there? Otherwise, you will be rambling blindly, without possibility to determine if you are gaining or loosing. This blog is dedicated to show and explain some social media mechanisms.

What is what?

Social media unable people to make social interactions between each other (i.e. becoming friends on Facebook), but most importantly, they are means of distributing and propagating the content. In other words, social media are tools which unable your content to be distributed thanks to interactions with other people. The most popular social media platforms are: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs. Once you publish your content, be it text (an article), podcast, picture etc. social media helps you to scale its popularity.

Social media – new public relations?

I would say that activity in social media is a new form of public relations. Similarly we could say that social media channels are new newspapers, magazines, TV/radio programmes and users are new journalists. And here is a point. The bottom line of social media marketing is sales – nothing changes here, the same in the offline world. But the weight is – should be – put on social interactions with real people. In social media space, social interactions apply – based on all human rules. There is a two-way communication – not like in the traditional media, where only one-way communication applies. It poses benefits but also risks to the brand. On the one hand a company gains an instant feedback on its actions, on the other hand, it has no control over users’ reactions. That little control makes crucial for a company to double care about its relationships with the users it affects.