Social Network

Social media marketing refers to the process of gaining traffic or attention through social media sites. Social media itself is a catch-all term for sites that may provide radically different social actions. For instance, Twitter is a social site designed to let people share short messages or “updates” with others. Facebook, in contrast is a full-blown social networking site that allows for sharing updates, photos, joining events and a variety of other activities.

Why would a search marketer — or a site about search engines — care about social media? The two are very closely related.

Social media often feeds into the discovery of new content such as news stories, and “discovery” is a search activity. Social media can also help build links that in turn support into SEO efforts. Many people also perform searches at social media sites to find social media content.

The main activity for manage social media campaigns is to make a community around the brand. The person who makes that happen is the online community manager. His role is a growing and developing profession. The people in this position work to build, grow and manage communities around a brand or cause.

Online community managers may serve a variety of roles depending on the nature and purpose of their online community, which may or may not be part of a profit motivated enterprise.

The budding Community Manager industry holds 4 tenets; these values resonate as a common thread within the role.

1. As a community advocate, the community managers’ primary role is to represent the customer. This includes listening, which results in monitoring, and being active in understanding what customers are saying in both the corporate community as well as external websites.

2. In this evangelistic role (it goes both ways) the community manager will promote events, products and upgrades to customers by using traditional marketing tactics and conversational discussions.

3. This tenet, which is both editorial planning and mediation, serves the individual well. The community manager should first be very familiar with the tools of communication, from forums, to blogs, to podcasts, to twitter, and then understand the language and jargon that is used in the community.

4. Perhaps the most strategic of all tenets, community managers are responsible for gathering the requirements of the community in a responsible way and presenting it to product teams. This may involve formal product requirements methods from surveys to focus groups, to facilitating the relationships between product teams and customers.

Bibliography

http://techcrunch.com/social/ Recognized Blog of Social Media, Business and Startups

http://www.seo.com/blog/managing-social-media-interaction/ Recognized Blog of Search Engine Optimization and Community Management.

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