Social Media Resources by Barrie Home Inspector
Today everyone is sharing their information with friends and family through a gamut of social media sites. Some of the more popular sites are Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, Blogspot, Pinterest and Xanga. Twitter has become a powerhouse of social sharing with its 140 character limit on tweets. Twitter has shown itself to be a source of information during real time events, such as the Arab Spring. Facebook is the most visited site in the United States. In 2008, total minutes spent on Facebook increased nearly 700 percent year-over-year, growing from 1.7 billion minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion in April 2009, making it the No. 1 social networking site for the month.
Communication on the internet appears in many formats including blogs and microblogs, forums and message boards, social networks, wikis, virtual worlds, social bookmarking, tagging and news, writing communities, digital storytelling and scrapbooking, and data, content, image and video sharing, podcast portals, and collective intelligence. In the year 2000 it is estimated that 70 million computers were connected to the internet. Malcolm Gladwell has stated, “The role of social media in protests and revolutions is grossly overstated.” “It (social media) makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.” . Many people disgree with this thought and think that social media actually can have an impact as it allows people to communicate their thoughts and beliefs without fear of retribution from governments. Although this concept is changing with the release of the information that the United States government is involved in spying on virtually everyone, friend and foe alike.
The most amazing benefit of the sheer magnitude of information and videos now available is that you can find out information on how to virtually do anything on the world wide web. I personally fixed my older X box, which had the “red ring of death”, and by following instructions from a YouTube video repaired the problem myself. There are videos on home inspection, car repairs to how to cook your food.
The explosion of smart phones has allowed everyday and unusual occurrences to go viral if the interest is there in the public. Social media has provide people with a platform where communicating with their peers is instant, decentralized and global in coverage. Big business is quickly jumping on the band wagon to hawk their wares to the masses through Social Media. There are times where people have drawn the ire of the social group as a whole where reaction can be negative and devastating, for example Esquire and their Falling Man ad which gave them the dubious honor of 911 Gaffe of the day. Anthony Wiener, running for mayor, chose to share some things of a more personal nature which probably will be the downfall of his campaign.
There are experts in manipulating social media whose goal it to manipulate traffic to benefit their clients. Using methods such as Social Media seeding, developing infographics, syndication relationships and blog posting is allowing companies to effectively promote companies who want to advertise to the masses through Social Media. The internet economy has created a wealth of new opportunity for modern marketers across search, social networks, and digital channels. Social marketing has brought with it the opportunity to create leads, drive engagement, and drive sales at costs far less than traditional offline channels. There is a wealth of content competing for each readers’ attention: It is estimated that each day brings 2 million blog posts, 294 billion emails, and 864 thousand hours of video are created daily. Each day also brings 400 million tweets.
Personally I prefer using such sites as Pinterest, Google Plus and 400 million tweets to promote my business. Being on the first page of Google is known to be a big plus for any business. If anyone would like to follow me, like my site or post a picture on Pinterest, thank you in advance. The Barrie Home Inspector