Conversation and engagement are vital components of a successful social media campaign. Make the most of your social presence by actively seeking out and engaging your target audience—expecting them to come to you won’t work. Additionally, playing an active role in the development of your business’s social network will help ensure that the time spent on your social profiles is contributing to the growth of your business.
If your brand is going to use social media marketing as a legitimate business building initiative and not just a popularity contest, choose your networks and friends wisely. You want to make sure you are reaching out to your target demographic. Plus, you want to make sure your brand is reaching out to those who will be you best product advocates.
MySpace has been losing ground lately to Facebook. Why? MySpace hasn’t kept pace with offering new features and functionality that keeps sites fresh. One of the reasons Facebook has leaped to the foreground for brand-building is they redesigned the pages that businesses create, making them more interactive and, most importantly, making it possible for those pages to become part of a company’s Facebook fans’ home page news feeds.
On the other hand, MySpace still remains one of the biggest sites on the Internet. According to comScore Inc., MySpace is one part of Fox Interactive Media, the fifth most visited set of properties on the web. Facebook on its own ranks No. 6, YouTube No. 1 as one part of Google Sites and Twitter on its own No. 46.
Even though MySpace is now known as the place for bands, there are still opportunities for companies to build their brand. There are companies that still use MySpace in its social marketing mix to ensure it’s reaching out to as many consumers as it can to spread the word about the company and its culture of customer service but also to put a face—literally, in many instances—to the company.
Facebook and MySpace are social networks in the broadest and deepest sense. They do everything: friends, profiles, photos, videos, applications—the list goes on. YouTube, however, does one thing, video. But it does it extraordinarily well.
Of the Big Four social networks, it draws the largest crowd: In June it reached 87.7 million unique visitors, a 22% year-over-year jump, research and measurement firm The Nielsen Co. reports.
Internet users can create their own accounts and channels with profiles and heaps of favorite videos. Once signed up, YouTube members can link to friends just like on Facebook and MySpace. And they can subscribe to the channels of others, including retailers, so when others post new videos they are alerted to the new content.
Not only does YouTube offer a high-visibility venue for brands to connect visually with consumers, it’s also a way to boost brand awareness via natural search, where videos are now routinely popping up in what is called blended search—search results with site links, images, videos, news links and more.
Videos posted on YouTube can get great exposure in natural search. It’s harder to find a video posted on a brand page on Facebook or MySpace than a video that’s been posted and properly tagged with keywords on YouTube.
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