Social media is getting a big buzz these days but what these sites are and how your company can get involved can be a bit confusing. With that in mind, we decided to give you a quick run down of some of the major social networking sites and how your company can best utilize them:
Facebook: Facebook allows you to create a page for your company and interested consumers can become your "fans." It is a good resource if you want to be able to post photos or video or let people know about occasional promotions.
Twitter: Twitter is intended to work as a dialogue between businesses and between businesses and their customers. Postings are limited to 160 characters, and people can choose to "follow" your "tweets" and you can follow others. Twitter works best if you have enough to say to be in constant communication with your customers or vendors. It functions best if you are able to engage in a give and take, where you engage in conversations with your followers and those you follow.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn really brings the "networking" to social networking. You can create a profile for your company, add "contacts", post available jobs, and a host of other functions. LinkedIn is especially useful for creating business-to-business contacts but is not a good way to try to push a product.
These are by no means the only sites in the social media realm, but these are some of the major players that you need to be aware of and evaluating their potential usefulness to your company.