As marketing departments and business owners continue to struggle to get their heads around the value of social networks as a marketing channel, let’s step back and remember what social networks really do for us.
Value of Social Social Networking as a Way of Connecting / Re-connecting
The original intent of the social network, Facebook, was to connect students at prestigious universities with their classmates and, eventually, with their friends at other schools. You could post a status update about what you were up to as well as “poke” someone, if you were into that kind of thing. Connecting with people was cool, but keeping up with someone’s ongoing activities was not super interesting.
Once the Newsfeed was released, this shifted the usefulness of Facebook because now you could see what everyone was up to, and gradually, people’s status updates shifted to postings about anything — a restaurant they liked or disliked, a trip they went on, using something at home.
Finding Usefulness in Social Network Updates
While Facebook status updates have become more stream of consciousness or random musings over time, Twitter has been that way almost since the beginning. You can drown pretty quickly in tweets, if you follow people who tweet frequently. Lists and Twitter search help make using Twitter much more manageable as you can curate your Twitter updates at your convenience.
Now, this is where the word of mouth marketing effect comes in. You can post an update to your social networks seeking an answer to a question like, if you’re going on a road trip and want to find out the best bbq place in Chapel Hill, but the person in your network who has that information may not see your post requesting that information.
However, that person did post about the best bbq place in Chapel Hill two months ago on Twitter. So people are spreading the word about what’s good and what’s not good on social networks, but it needs to be easier to access this valuable info when it’s actually needed.
Unlocking Word of Mouth Info
Last week, I met Ron Williams, founder of SnapGoods, who’s working on a service called Knodes that’s focused on solving the word of mouth discovery problem on the social networks. I’m psyched to play around with the service because I think it’s the missing link to unlocking the valuable word of mouth info that’s lurking in all of our social networks.
Image by -Tripp-
What other ways can people find trusted sources of info within their social networks?
Free Social Media Strategy Template
Are you overwhelmed by the number of social media sites and don’t how to integrate social media into your sales and marketing plans?.
If you don’t have one already, here is a free template that will help you clearly identify and align your business goals and social media marketing activity.
You might also like:
