Social media training–what is it and why should you care?

Social media sites are great places to get free traffic that already has a relationship with you.  You interact with your customers, gain your reader’s trust and then you can direct them back to your site.

Social media sites are social.  Blogs, comments, forums, wikis–all of these are ways for people to interact online.  When you use these tools in your business, you interact with your viewer.  Once they blog with you, they already feel like they know you.

Leads that come from social media sites are fantastic leads that want what you offer–in fact, they followed you from the social media site to your site.  They have already made a commitment to you.

And leads like this mean that you can grow your business easily.  Your leads will request your help.

The best training for social media, bar none, is found at Renegade Professional.

Qualities of Good Social Media Training?

• Social media is a broad array of sites–any site where people interact and add their own content.  YouTube, Squidoo, HubPages are just a few examples.  All of these sites allow people to post comments and respond to each other.  Other types of social media include blogs and forums.  The best social media training addresses all of these sites.
• Good training in social media teaches how to use all these sites.  How do you set up a YouTube channel?  What settings are best for a Squidoo lens?  When you teach yourself, each site poses a huge learning curve.
• The very best social media training teaches not only how to use the social media sites, but also how these sites fit in with your entire sales funnel.  Once you make a YouTube video, what do you do with it?  What are Facebook pages and how can you use them for your business?  How do you turn an online discussion into buying customers?

Renegade Professional is unique in that it gives not only the basic click by click details of using social media marketing, but also it gives a broad perspective of building a business plan.  This training gives you the tools and the understanding of when and how to use them.

Social Media is the hot new thing on the internet.  New social media sites are emerging all the time.  But what is the social media definition?

What is the Social Media Definition?

Social media are sites where individuals can interact online.  They publish content in little chunks and make it available for everyone to see.  This means that the definition of social media includes a broad array of sites–from YouTube, EzineArticles.com, and flickr to HubPages, and Squidoo.  Comments, blogs, and forums are all social media sites.  Even wiki sites fall under this heading.  Anything where individuals are interacting.  Their interactions become content for the host site.

What is the Significance of Social Media?

Social media sites allow everyone to put their two cents into the pot of collective knowledge.  Want to write about “Top 5 Reasons to Enjoy a Long Drive to Work“?  elisabethkcmo at HubPages already did.  Maybe you have a new angle on that topic that you want to add–make a comment on her HubPage and join in the discussion.

With social media, every person has a voice.  Every person can make their own YouTube video and show the world their own unique vision.  Every person can write an expert article about their own unique hobby.  And then the online community reacts when they make comments and link to the content.

And with all that self expression, little tiny microscopic niche interests emerge.  Every person who likes videos of ant hills will find each other on YouTube.  You may have been the only person in town who collect clown noses before, but now you find there’s a world wide community of clown nose collectors.

Social media sites are changing the way we view knowledge, democratizing it and changing the idea of what an “expert” is.  On the internet, everyone is an expert and every one can weigh in on the issues.

The definition of social media sites would seem to be just what it says–social.  But what’s interesting is that social media is changing the way we do business as well.

How do Social Media Sites Benefit Businesses?

There are a number of ways social media sites can benefit businesses.

• They are a free, and easy way to publish content online which builds your credibility as an expert.
• The social media sites have a lot of traffic and this gives your media exposure.
• Publishing on social media sites can build links back to your website, increasing its worthiness to the search engine spiders.
• Social media sites are great ways to build relationships with your customers because they are so social.  Get your customers commenting on how to use your latest product and when you answer their questions online, you’ve built their trust that the product is for them.
• And best of all, social media sites give you one more way to attract customers and build your list.

In the new business world, a business must have a strong relationship with its customers.  Anonymous ads on a billboard do not build customer loyalty.  To counteract the anonymity of the internet, businesses must interact and communicate with their customers.  Social media sites provide the means for that communication.