The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success, Second Edition

Chapter 39. The Social Media Trinity

We discuss in this chapter the importance of the Social Media Trinity: Blogging, Microblogging (Twitter), and Social Networks. Chapter 7—The Ubiquitous Blog, discusses blogs quite thoroughly, while Chapter 14—Thumbs Up for Microblogging discusses Twitter and other microblogs (mobile text message communication that is limited to 140 characters), and Chapter 2—Say Hello to Social Networking discusses social networks. Here, I want you to understand the importance of these three chapters and their associated technologies. If you understand the Social Media Trinity, you will have a good understanding of 90 percent of everything you need to be successful using social media in your marketing strategy.

At the risk of being redundant, I am going to list many of the particular features of each of these three technologies so you can go back and read or learn more. Let's start with blogs.

Trinity Number One—Blogs

As I discussed in Chapter 7, blogs are an integral component to social media marketing. Blogs help you and your company build a trusted following, allow you to brand yourself in a strong environment, get you and your brand in front of your audience automatically, and frequently, set you up as a perceived industry thought leader.

Get to know the five Ws of blogging: the Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How. The Who is two-fold: Who within your organization is the right person to blog on your company's behalf. Who likes to communicate through the use ...