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If you’re not actively using social media to promote your business, you’re at a disadvantage. Services like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest are now giving small one-person businesses the exposure that used to require a six-figure marketing budget. While this additional access to potential clients is fantastic, the downside is that there’s a lot to learn and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. The good news is that by just taking a few simple steps, you can leverage social media to effectively promote your business.
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What is Twitter? What is a Tweet? I get asked this all the time as Twitter (like Pinterest) is in a class of its own among social media sites. It’s wildly popular and second only to Facebook in terms of user base. In a nut shell, Twitter is a micro-blogging site – that means that you post tweets (status updates that are less than 140 characters in length) about whatever you want to share.
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I’ve been saying for a while that I question how long the world’s most popular social media service will retain its popularity. Yes, there are security and privacy issues that come up from time to time and some of the games and activities on there can waste people’s time to the point where they put their jobs at risk. But what I feel will do in Facebook is that it will become a victim of its own success.
Quality is extremely important in the business world – if you make crappy products or provide horrible services, you won’t survive. Even as speakers, a good talker can get anyone to hire him/her for a presentation, but only if that person is a quality speaker will he or she be hired for a second engagement. Quality also affects our online presence – probably in more ways than you realize. If you’re just online for casual conversation, then this may or may not concern you. If you’re online to promote your business, cause or idea, then it’s something you want to pay attention to.
People are finicky. Doing something to please one person may upset another. You simply can’t please everyone and social media has made this quite evident. People unfollow on Twitter or unfriend on Facebook for no apparent reason. Maybe you said something that offended them or maybe you just sounded boring to them. There’s no rhyme nor reason and you can’t expect people to think or act the way you do.
A blog that I frequently visit came into some recent criticism that I felt was worth talking about. The site, Orlando Theme Parks News, which provides information and updates on all the theme parks in the Orlando, FL area skips over attractions that its owner feels are too ‘dark.’ This is includes the new Harry Potter’s World of Wizardry at Universal Orlando and the Haunted Mansion at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. Again, the site’s owner feels that these attractions conflict with his beliefs, so he never mentions them in his reports. This has caused a bit of an uproar on one of his posts, which makes me wonder: who really has control over your blog?
While I noticed the absence of the Harry Potter land in a report, I didn’t think much of it until I read the comments on one particular article. Some people were respectful while others used terms like ‘religious nut’. Keep in mind that this website is free to use and the ads are very unobtrusive, yet people still complained as if they are not getting their money’s worth. This guy takes the time to visit all these theme parks to take pictures and post information, yet people complain that he doesn’t do more.
A decade is an eternity in the world of technology. A site, service or company on top of the world today may be gone tomorrow. So the big question is the future of the world’s most popular social network – Facebook. Will it be as popular? Will something else be the next big thing? Will it even still be around?
Well, no one really knows for sure what will happen to Facebook or social media in general in the next few years. And with so many factors that could make or break a company, it’s about as easy to predict as it is to predict Barack Obama’s successor. Of course, that doesn’t scare me from taking a good educated guess so I’ll not only look at what might happen to Facebook, but also include some scenarios as to how it could be overtaken as the social media juggernaut. So let’s start with my prediction.
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