20

Aug

Social Media: What Has It Done For You Lately?

Posted by: Carolyn Young

There were two sessions at Affiliate Summit East that focused solely on the impact social media has on internet marketing. Depending on your business, social media may not be the most appropriate branding method for you – but if have a way to incorporate it, then it comes highly recommended.

Here are the social media websites that were most discussed and favored at Affiliate Summit:

• Twitter: Twitter is extremely popular within the Affiliate Summit crowd. In one session, the panelists were twittering while they were presenting and using Twitter as their Q&A platform. Some businesses use Twitter to build brand awareness, create customer service portals, perform research & development, and build communities. Zappo’s success with Twitter was repeatedly mentioned (http://twitter.zappos.com/).
• Facebook: Facebook can be a great tool for advertising your brand and/or building communities surrounding your product or service. There are viral marketing methods (building a group or page) as well as targeted paid advertisements available to increase exposure. Because of its fairly recent popularity, there isn’t too much information known about the success or failure rates of advertising on Facebook yet, but hopefully there will be some data available in the near future (we will keep you posted).
• Friendfeed: Friendfeed is a website that can monitor and provide alerts about the different web activity that you and/or your contacts participate in (Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, RSS feeds, etc.). This is still in the early adoption phase, and was more mentioned as a site to keep on the radar more than anything else.
• Seesmic: Seesmic is a website that is a combination of YouTube and Twitter. The user uploads a video, other users reply with their own videos, and (poof!) a video conversation has been created. Just like on Twitter, you can follow users that you like – you just get video updates instead of text.

As time passes, internet marketers will only learn more about each of these websites and their contribution to the success of a company’s marketing plan. We will do our best to keep you updated with what we have found to work best for us and our clients.