| Facebook |
- Currently the leading social network site
|
- Provides a place where people interested in your products or brand can post information and discuss the products
- Encourages continuous visitation by constantly putting up new content and pictures that your viewing audience will find compelling
- Gathers feedback from those interested enough to post on your Facebook page
- Used as a place to promote products to a group of interested fans
|
| LinkedIn |
- Professional networking site
|
- Helps maintain professional contacts
- Useful for finding job applicants and business opportunities
- Displays professional activities and links to your content
- Opportunity to demonstrate expertise by participating in well-defined discussion groups
- Can start and maintain your own discussion group
|
| Twitter |
- A micro-blogging site
- Messages sent only to your specific followers
- Each Tweet is limited to 140 characters
|
- Allows you to build a social media tribe with which to maintain a continuous conversation
- Enables a variety of separate conversations to be maintained with different communities
- Can be used to build and promote a brand image
- Provides a forum for immediate customer feedback
- Can be used to get the word out to loyal followers in case of a crisis
|
| YouTube |
- Leading video sharing site
(owned by Google)
|
- Post how-to product demonstrations
- Share videos of customers using your products
- Sponsor video content that attracts your target audience
- Post discussions and Q and A sessions from employees or experts promoting your enterprise or products
|
| MySpace |
- Social networking site
- Current focus is on communities for music and video
|
- Forum to promote recorded music, movies, TV shows, etc.
- Each band/offering can have its own page and provide news, videos, music cuts, and fan chat
|
| Tumblr |
- A micro-blogging platform
- Mostly used to share images
|
- Share brief multimedia posts
- Users can post pictures, animations, video, audio clips, etc.
- Simple to use
|
| Google+ |
- New social networking site from Google
- Still in beta test
|
- Good for setting up networking circles to share information
- Presents image of being cutting edge by leaping on what may be the next big thing
|
| Blogs |
- A website where one or more individuals post information, opinions, links, pictures, videos etc., usually in chronological order
- Name from web log
|
- Gives your organization a human face
- Helps build a digital tribe for your organization by giving it a home base
- Provides a place to post information about new products, address customer concerns and list promotions
- Provides a forum for public and customer feedback
|
| Community forums/ message boards |
- A website where a community can discuss various topics and answer questions for other participants
- Discussion areas are usually defined by the forum/board owner
|
- Used to answer questions about your products or other areas of expertise
- Can build your brand by actively participating in relevant communities and sharing useful information
- Opportunity to gather information from a community of users that is discussing products or other topics of interest
|
| Customer comments |
- A portion of a website where customers rate and discuss specific products
- Often associated with product pages on eCommerce websites
|
- Used to collect feedback about your product
- See what competitors customers are saying about them
|
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