Social Media Marketing

The book I read to research this post was Social Media Marketing Unleashed by John Elder which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is around 90 pages so is quite short and succinct and I think might have been free to download. Much of the book is a history of social networking which has been going on longer than you think. The earliest social media was probably Compuserve which gave people access to the internet but had a site with their own content that many people interacted with. Then along came companies like Geocities which anyone could join and among other things they gave members a small amount of free web space and many of these looked like modern day facebook pages albet with adverts. Then along came AOL who charged $19.95 per month and marketed quite aggressively their cd roms that gave members a kind of interactive sandbox complete with email and a vast array of internet content as well as being an ISP. Then along came sites like Friendster & MySpace that were free to use and were proper social media sites. They gave you your own page that you could set up however you wanted. Nowadays the competition has really heated up with sites like Facebook & Twitter and a lot of the reason the former is so popular over say MySpace is there web site is compatible with a wide range of formats with things like photos and video. Also there is a strong community spirit where you are encouraged to post and your friends can comment on it. I must admit I prefer Twitter out of the 2 because you are encouraged to tweet rather than blog which does take time although I do enjoy blogging. I think alot of people feel if they write a blog post they are expected to write quite a lot where as with tweeting they are limited in length and you just focus on making what you write good. If you do a company it suggests doing the name convention blog.company name.com. It also suggests doing blog posts of about 500 words because the search engines have something substantial to index. I enjoyed reading this book & I think I would recommend it.