Social Media Is More Than Just YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter

Jamie Turner and Dr. Reshma Shah

Social media is similar to a snowball. When it gets going, it builds and builds. With a little bit of luck and a good amount of work, your social media campaign will eventually create its own circular momentum. When that happens, youre off to the races.

But most people misunderstand social media programs. Its not just about uploading a YouTube video or creating a LinkedIn profile. Its about creating a wide variety of channels through which your customers and prospects can connect with you.

The more channels you provide, the better the odds are that youll create enough circular momentum to generate real results for your campaign. We like to think of it as analogous to a house fire. (Its an odd analogy, but hang with us.) If your house caught on fire, youd have two choices: 1) use your garden hose to fight the fire, or 2) call the fire department and use dozens of serious fire hoses.

If you decided to use the garden hose to put out your house fire...well, you might as well not even try. It wont work, so save your time and money. But if you decided to call the fire department, now youre talking. They can put some real effort behind the cause and, hopefully, save your house.

The bottom line is that momentum is critical, whether youre putting out a house fire or creating a social media campaign. Make sense?

The same holds true for a social media campaign. If your idea of a social media campaign is to create a Twitter profile and then update it every day or so, dont bother. Itll never get the traction youre looking for, so its not worth it.

But if youre serious about setting yourself up for social media success, put some serious effort behind it. Add some depth and breadth to your social media campaign. Depth is diving deep into each social media platform and really putting some energy into it. Breadth is doing social media across a wide variety of platforms, not just one or two.

This raises the question of how much bandwidth you have for additional assignments at work. How can you add work to your already-full plate and expect to do a good job with it?

Well, heres some news. Despite what youve heard, social media isnt free. Although some of the media costs are free (for example, its free to upload a video to YouTube), other costs, such as the production costs and the labor costs, arent free. If youre a smaller business such as a restaurant or a real estate brokerage, thats an important consideration, because you shouldnt launch a social media campaign unless you have the bandwidth. If you work at a larger corporation, its also an important consideration because youll have to assign staff to manage it.

Its also important to really embrace the concept that social media is not just about uploading a YouTube video or creating a LinkedIn profile. Sure, those are important components of most social media campaigns, but those are not the only components of a social media campaign. A good, solid, viable social media campaign crosses many platforms and requires a commitment of time, money, and focus for it to succeed.

Social Media Tools to Help You Network, Promote, and Share

Now lets talk about the three broad categories of social media platformsthose that help you network, those that help you promote, and those that help you share.

Hundreds of different social media platforms exist, so we cant cover them here. However, we can give you the most popular and relevant platforms that are part of each of these categories. By breaking them into categories, you can identify which tool is the most appropriate for your specific task.

Notice that you can apply some of the tools across several categories. For example, LinkedIn falls into the networking category, although its often used to promote. For simplicity, weve assigned each tool to only one category.

Lets take a quick look at the tools that help you network. You can find a bunch of them if you look around, but the ones youre probably most familiar with include LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. But the list doesnt stop there. Plaxo, Xing, and Friendster are also great tools that you can use to connect with others on a professional (or more casual) level. Classmates and MyLife are tools that can help you find people who know you and see whos searching for you. Ning and Bebo are also excellent tools to help you create networks and share your life with others online.

The social media tools that can help you promote are the tools that are often used for sales and marketing. You can use them to drive traffic to your Web site or to your social media channels. By doing so, youre using social media to do more than just build awarenessyoure using it to drive revenue. And whats the point of doing anything in business if it doesnt ultimately drive revenue, right?

Some of the most well-known social media tools that you can use to help promote include YouTube, Flickr, and MySpace. Other great social media promotional tools include Picasa (photo sharing and editing), Xanga (blogging community), and iLike (similar to MySpace).

Using social media to promote your product or service is an art, but realize that heavy-handed promotions can sometimes backfire. Social media is about