Social Networking 101 for Businesses

Social Media Marketing differs from traditional marketing, in that, instead of being targeted by marketers, consumers want to interact with marketers.  Below is a collection of excepts to help businesses get started with social media and social marketing.  Stay tuned for more tips!

Nowadays, everybody is talking about Social Media Marketing (SMM) and how great it is for promoting a business. The truth is, most people are really confused about SMM, and they feel very frustrated because they want to take advantage of it but just don’t know how. The goal of this article is to help those people plan and execute a successful SMM campaign.

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Give Before You Take. Share your expertise, help others, post articles and answer questions. Don’t start asking for business on day one. Social networking is for building relationships and trust.

Be Active. Spend 15 minutes every day building your network, posting comments and contacting other community members. If you aren’t noticed in your community, you might as well not be there.

Share Your Knowledge. If you are one of those people who wants to join social networks to benefit from what others know, but you’re not willing to be generous and share your own knowledge, you will never be successful at SMM. When you start sharing what you know, people open up to you. That’s when you start building valuable relationships. If you are always giving, people will want to reciprocate.

Source: PartnerUp

Vatican Launches Facebook Application

The Pope

The Vatican is using Facebook; why aren’t you?

According to the Tampa Tribune:

Web surfers can now send virtual postcards of Pope Benedict XVI to their Facebook friends or follow the pontiff’s travel on their iPhones.

Under a papacy that has suffered communication woes, the Vatican is taking new, technologically savvy steps to bring its message to social networking sites and smartphones.

In its first day of operation Thursday, the Pope2You portal gathered some 45,000 contacts and 500,000 page views, while a Facebook application that sends postcards with photos of Benedict and excerpts from his messages was used around 10,000 times, the head of the project said.

Also available on the portal is an application for iPhone and iPod Touch that gives surfers video and audio news on the pope’s trips and speeches, as well as on Catholic events worldwide.

The new Web site is the latest update in the Vatican’s efforts to broaden the pope’s audience and reach out to young people. In January, Benedict got his own YouTube channel, which is now linked to the portal.

Read the entire article at Tampa Tribune

Video: Social Media in Plain English

CommonCraft.com explains Social Media in Plain English.  Thanks CommonCraft! Check them out.