“Social media is the use of technology to COMMUNICATE and COLLABORATE with people across the globe to build an engaged and sustainable COMMUNITY rich in CULTURE.”
Defining social media continues to be a challenge for practitioners to convey to new audiences. Above is my definition, derived through countless discussions and explorations of our practice. Wikipedia has a different definition which indicates that there are disagreements in just what is social media. But, this definition works for the the type of clientele, the type of communities we’re building here at Oceanit, for our clients, through our volunteer work, and for our personal lives. This will be a 4-part series highlighting each of the 4 Cs of social media.
“Communication in social media is about how your targeted audience wants to communicate.”
What does it mean to COMMUNICATE?
With respect to social media, this definition of the word communicate “to give or interchange thoughts, feelings, information,…” is appropriate as it’s about giving and receiving information, not broadcasting. How are you communicating with your friends, followers, and community members? If you’re only broadcasting information, then unfortunately you’re not communicating effectively on social media. Also, if you’re only replying to comments and posts directed to you, you’re still falling short of the giving and receiving of information.
5 Ways to Communicate Using Social Media
There are several different channels to communicate using social networks and media publishing tools, the following are 5 ways to communicate using those channels:
- Public — These are any published content that the public can view such as:
- Status updates on Twitter or Facebook walls.
- Replies to others across the different social channels.
- Retweets of others’ posts on Twitter.
- Clicking on ‘like’ or ‘share’ on others’ posts on Facebook.
- Sharing articles, photos, blog posts of others’ published content.
- Your own blog posts.
- Comments on blog posts and articles.
- Private — These are posts that are communicated only to a particular individual or group such as:
- Emails.
- Direct Messages on Twitter.
- Private Messages.
- Instant Messaging.
- SMS Text or Group Messaging.
- Facebook messages.
- Newsletters.
- Verbal — These are specific types of published content such as:
- Non-verbal — This is the tone set by your text, video, audio, or photo content.
- In-Person — This is a very important step in communicating such as:
- Social Gatherings — These are of any size and at your budget and convenience. If your budget doesn’t allow you to host, at the very least show your support and attend another organization’s public gathering.
- Community Outreach — Again, supporting the efforts of other organizations helps you to communicate with a much larger audience.
- Networking Events — If you’re in Honolulu, Nextworking co-hosted by AT Marketing‘s Toby Tamaye is probably the biggest and most diverse networking event in town. Why not show your support?
I’ll go more in depth in a future post about time-management and social media, but for now explore and digest the information above. It’s a lot, especially if you’re new to the social media industry. Just remember, there are 4 C’s to social media: communication, collaboration, community, and culture. Keep it simple and in byte sizes, after all this is just a taste of social media.
