The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success, 3rd Edition

Trinity Number Three—Social Networks

The third and last part of the Trinity of Social Media is social networks. Now is a good time to reread Chapter 2—Say Hello to Social Networking.

Once again, it is in your best interest to understand the Five Ws—Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How. The Who is you, or someone who can manage the social network site. That person needs to stay active, participate, kick out advertisers and spammers, post new content, and have a social presence.

The What is your content. You are building a friendly website that uses you as the representative of your company. Understand what persona you are going to use. It should be much different from the persona you use when you are interfacing with college classmates, or the teen you dated in high school.

The When is now. The earlier you get a presence and a following the better. The Why is because any time you have a watering hole (a marketing term for a place that like-minded customers and prospects gather), with 425,000,000 members, you need to be there. You need to be available to participate in that conversation. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third-largest country in the world, exceeding the 309,409,364 total population of the United States. For the How, reread Chapter 2 and read on.

What Are the Terms

Again, with each of the three technologies described in this chapter, you will need to understand the vocabulary. You need to understand what a profile, group, fan page, in-mail, questions, and ...