Social media? Why not?
Does your company use advanced information and communication technologies? Sure, you'll reply. How can it be otherwise these days when all people - be it an individual or a business customer - are now using computers to search for new information, studying, shopping, working, and a million of other things. Is there anyone who will disagree that social media are among the best ways for all of us to communicate with each other in this highly globalised world?
Social media are media for social interaction which has become possible with the advent of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0. Recent statistics shows that if a business organisation wants to be successful, it needs to "be present" through all kinds of social media, such as Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wikis, podcasts, pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking. Only consider the following figures:
- Social networking now accounts for 11 percent of all time spent online in the US.
- A total of 234 million people age 13 and older in the U.S. used mobile devices in December 2009.
- Twitter processed more than one billion tweets in December 2009 and averages almost 40 million tweets per day.
- Over 25% of U.S. internet page views occurred at one of the top social networking sites in December 2009, up from 13.8% a year before.
Looks impressive, doesn't it?
Wikipedia offers many examples of social media software applications, but some of them are a "must" for today's business. Let your clients stay in touch with you through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogger, and LifeJournal, to name but a few!