Social Media Services for your Business. 7 Different Types of Social Media Channels

August 29, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
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Social media is a suite of online services that facilitates two-way communication and content sharing. Social media is only part of your online marketing strategy. Social Media Marketing generally refers to using a mix of online services for relationship selling in order to produce traffic, leads, and sales. For example, Social Media Services in the Middle East make innovative use of new online technologies to accomplish familiar communication and marketing goals. These services can enhance your company’s online visibility, strengthen relationships with your clients, and expand word-of-mouth advertising.

Should your business get involved in social media marketing? Your business can use social media strategically to:
✦ Meet an otherwise unmet marketing need
✦ Increase access to your target market
✦ Open the door to a new niche market
✦ Move prospects through the conversion funnel
✦ Improve the experience for existing customers

If you undertake a social marketing campaign, we urge you to target one niche market at a time; grow that market; reinvest your profits in the next niche.

Here are the different types of social media channels:

1) Blogs: Web sites designed to let you easily update or change content and allow readers to post their own opinions or reactions.

2) Social networking services: Originally developed to facilitate the exchange of personal information (messages, photos, ideo, audio) to groups of friends and family, these full-featured services offer multiple functions. From a business point of view, many of them support subgroups that offer the potential for more targeted marketing.
• Full networks such as Facebook, MySpace, or myYearbook
• Microblogging (short message) networks such as Twitter or Plurk
• Professional networks such as LinkedIn and Plaxo
• Other specialty networks within vertical industry, demographic, or activity segments

3) Social-media sharing services: These media channels facilitate posting and commenting on videos, photos, and podcasts (audio):
• Video: Examples are YouTube, Vimeo, or Ustream.
• Photos: Flickr, Photobucket, or Picasa
• Audio: Podcast Alley or BlogTalkRadio

4) Social bookmarking services: Similar to private bookmarks for your
favorite sites on your computer, social bookmarks are publicly viewable lists of sites that others have recommended:
• Recommendation services such as StumbleUpon, Delicious
• Social shopping services such as Kaboodle or ThisNext
• Other bookmarking services organized by topic or application, such as book recommendation sites

5) Social news services: On these peer-based lists of recommended articles from news sites, blogs, or Web pages, users often “vote” on the value of the postings:
• Digg
• reddit
• Other news sites

6) Social geolocation and meeting services: For a change, these services bring people together in real space rather than in cyberspace:
• Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt
• Other GPS (global positioning system) applications, many of which operate on mobile phones
• Meet-ups and tweet-ups

7) Community building services: Many comment- and content-sharing sites have been around for a long time, such as forums, message boards, and Yahoo! and Google groups. Other examples are
• Community building sites with multiple sharing features such as Ning
• Wikis such as Wikipedia for group-sourced content
• Review sites such as TripAdvisor and Epinions to solicit consumer views

 

 

 

 

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