Social Media tools

You've probably seen these badges on many websites now, and you might have wondered what they are and why they are there. Over the past few years, there has been a massive growth in social media tools such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Some of them are purely social, others are business-focussed and some sit right on the fence.

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that has gained huge momentum since its launch in 2006. It's essentially a mechanism for telling people what you are doing, in short, succinct chunks. Many people simply ask us "why?" with a look of bemusement. However as well as a useful mechanism for sending out short marketing messages to your followers, there are other interesting ways to gain business advantage using Twitter. We can tell you, for example, how one of our clients used Twitter to provide live updates to their audience at a major international event.

Fact: your customers and members come together to talk about your business on Facebook. It has become the ubiquitous social networking platform since it started out at Harvard University in 2004. The days of poking people and giving them fish have gone, and the site is now a serious networking tool. There's at least one group for pretty much every brand on the planet, most of which were set up by customers, not companies. We can help you understand how to engage with these groups of people to your advantage, even if what they are saying about you is not great.

Whilst Facebook is known for being at the "social" end of the social media scale, LinkedIn is the professional networking tool of choice for thousands of people looking to network and promote themselves to potential customers and employers. As with Facebook, if you have a brand, someone, somewhere on LinkedIn will be talking about you, making comments about you, and asking questions about you. We can help you put yourself in front of these people in a positive way and maximise the benefits you can take from building a relationship with them.

Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet. Instead of having different bookmarks on every computer, Delicious makes it easy to have a single set of bookmarks kept in sync between all of your computers. Even if you're not on a computer you own, you can still get to your bookmarks on the Delicious website.