What is Social Media? It's Not What You Think It Is - Episode #14

Hey everyone. Welcome to Jim Talk Episode #14.

Today I want to talk a bit about social media and what exactly is social media. 

Now a lot of people, when they hear the term social media, they automatically think of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. That's not social media. Those are the platforms that we use to post our social media on. Social media is also a term that you use or that we use to describe what the internet now is.

So what exactly is social media? 

Social media is about interacting with people. It's about being sociable and it's about using media to do just that.  

I mean years ago we used to be sociable by going to events and by networking. I guess we still do a bit of that but now we can be sociable and we can interact with people using these platforms. And and how do we use these platforms?

First of all we put out our media. The way do we put out media is using these tools, these platforms. For example, we could use Facebook.

So with Facebook we can put out posts.

A post could be a piece of text, an image or a video.

The idea is a text will get some views. An image will get more views. And a video will get more views than an image. 

So what you would ideally want to do, if you're going to put out some Facebook content, is you want to put out a post in video format. 

There's another format in Facebook that you can use called Facebook Live where you can actually stream live videos and save those. 

Another platform that's popular is Instagram. 

Instagram has the same capability. You can put out text. You can put out images. And you can put out video. Instagram also has a live feed so very similar. 

Another platform is Twitter.

Twitter is more text-based than an image based feed. A lot of people will use Twitter to put out random thoughts throughout the day.

Twitter is more tolerable to more posts.

That means you can put out a lot more content, a lot more different posts, a lot more posts throughout the day so it won't irritate people, usually. With Facebook and Instagram - once a day is probably what people would be okay to see.

Another platform is Snapchat.

I haven't used it that much but the way Snapchat works is it mimics a "real" conversation. So you will say something (a snap)... you get 30 seconds to say something ... and then you can save it into your Snapchat stories. But within 24 hours, it's gone. So it's like a conversation. You don't get to keep the conversations around you. You have them and they're gone.

The other big platform is YouTube.

YouTube isn't really a social media platform, but it's really one that's used for retaining and putting out long-form video content. And that content is usually saved within YouTube. You use the other platforms, like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, to distribute and to let people know that you've got those videos that you just recorded. 

So that's how you could create media as the social media content on those platforms. 

The other thing that people don't realize is that you have to interact.

Social media is about being interactive. It's about talking to people.

What you want to do on those platforms is you will want to reply to people's comments. You want to make sure that you're fully engaged. Social media is about being engaged. It's about building a relationship with your network. It's about being social.

I'm going to keep using the word "social" because when people think social media they think they can just go out and they can post something on Facebook or Twitter or on Snapchat and that's it. They don't want to bother to interact with people. Being active, being engaged in social media is a lot of work and requires you to really, really take the time to engage with your audience, to be interactive, to create a friendship with these people. 

Then the other thing you will want to do is, not only do you want to post and reply to your own content, to your own posts, you will also want to go out and search other people's platforms, other people's accounts or go out to different groups like Facebook groups.

You want to post there and you want to start having a conversation there. Again, you want to make sure that you're engaged with these people on these different platforms and you want to build that relationship. You want to have that interaction going on all the time.

So that's really what social media is all about. It's not the platforms ... don't get confused about social medias being those platforms I mentioned - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Socialmedia is all about engaging with your customers or with your followers and having a conversation and to build up a relationship so that people see who you really are and they learn that you can provide information that they may be interested in.

Okay, so that concludes our talk for tonight. Thanks very much and good night.