Does Social Media have a hierarchy?

Many people want social media but get very daunted by the number of platforms, the content they may or may not need and generally feel it looks rather complicated.

While in essence Social Media is actually very simple, it is actually quite hard to get organised if you don’t know what you’re doing.

There are actually certain areas which form the building blocks for Social Media and each part of the puzzle has it’s place.  However, how do you work out what’s more important than another element?

In this blog, we aim to try and assist you in defining your social media and how it plays an important role in all areas of your online presence.  Therefore, if you want to work out how and why it’s relevant to Search Engine Marketing or why it’s relevant to PR, then this blog should help you.

So, as a small business you may have seen Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, Flickr, Delicious or a number of other social media platforms and thought I definitely need them but I don’t know why.

The first piece of advice is to STOP!

This is because every social media process requires building and in the most simple terms, you cannot build a house without working out the foundations first!

Don’t tell yourself you need them all and panic about how and what to do once they’re all set-up.  People make a lot of mistakes through this method and it really means you only end up ‘resolving’ them later on.

A recent client tried to set-up their own social media and ended up with a Facebook group that couldn’t do what they wanted it to do, numerous other ‘Like’ pages and no hope of solving the mess until we came along.

Your Foundations

First we need to understand where to start and in your case it should most definitely be a blog.  There are a million reasons why this is the case, but for simplicity of understanding let’s stick to some great reasons:

• Great for Search Engine Marketing purposes
• Great for SEO and gaining better rankings
• Great for broadening your Internet footprint
• Great for solidifying your expertise within your field

A blog is the core of any social media marketing campaign because it allows you to organise all the rest, but still retain core control.

Next you need to get your RSS and XML feeds sorted out.  Read our previous blog on what this is and why it’s important but essentially:

• Great for increasing your Search Engine Rankings
• Great for generating website traffic
• Great for allowing people to get updates from  you regularly

Next you need to look at what people are saying about you.  This can be done in a number of ways and there are a good amount of places to get help, but one of the most popular ways is the Google tool which can be set to update you whenever someone mentions your name, company details or keywords for example.  This is best utilised as part of your Search Engine Marketing strategy so do ask your provider about this feature.

Social Bookmarking (again see our previous blog about this)  Tagging content and being part of some of the larger social bookmarking communities can provide an important part of your traffic driving strategy and is most definitely worth considering.

Next are your actual social networks themselves.  You may want to use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, You Tube, Flickr etc. And now you have your blog set-up you should be much better placed to work out what you want to use them for and why.

So you can see very easily why it’s important to forget about doing everything at once and to utilise a specific plan instead, because this will make managing everything a whole lot easier.

What next?

Once you’ve set it all up the next step is managing the content and streamlining your activities.  Little Big Voice can assist you with this on lots of levels, from blogging based content through to advice on how to integrate your blog to Facebook and Twitter, which will allow you more time to focus on your actual business.

Our next blog spends more time covering the management of your social media so do come back for updates!

Paul