Social Media Basics by Patrick Tam Jan 20 2012

The Right Social Networks

Yes, Facebook is dominant in most countries (but not all), Twitter is toppling governments, LinkedIn is getting everyone head hunted, and Google+ is at 67 million users in no time. However, these social networks have a combined worldwide market share of 78 percent (see Wikipedia); they are often not your social network of choice especially in many Asian countries, such as China, Korea, and Japan. {READ THE REST}

If your target market is one of those in the 22 percent, the landscape is often very fragmented, broken down by ages and topics. Care must be taken to select the social network that best represents your target demographic.

When faced with many choices, the temptation to be on all of them is high. Don’t, because building word-of-mouth successfully in social media is about creating high quality engagement. A bunch of half-hearted presences is only detrimental to your brand.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

It’s important not to be too self-centered when building up your social media presence. Apart from sprucing up your page/group and making it lively, it is also critical to know what is going on “out there” away from your page/group. Many tools can help you do that, to gauge the ”temperature” on your topic of interest, or to find out exactly who’s-saying-what-from-where-and-when. Granularity of your need is directly proportional to their costs – the deeper you want to drill, the more expensive the tools tend to be.

How to select these tools is easily another long article, but the main point here is that you will need some tools. Don’t think you can do this meaningfully manually (there is only so much those interns can do!).