Social awareness is similar to having a social media online reputation, except that social awareness is more about getting the message out there than it is about building up a reputation. Making people socially aware of you or your piece of news is just a case of making yourself heard (or read) on the social media networks.
Creating social media awareness will help you to generate sales and leads. It will help you to create brand advocates, resolve customer issues and humanize your brand. It can be used to improve your online and brand reputation and can be used to manage a reputation crisis.
Facebook profiles
Facebook has a worldwide attendance of around 750,000,000 unique monthly visits, so your audience is fairly large. This means that you can reach a lot of people on Facebook on a fairly regular occasion. Having a personal profile is a good way of promoting social awareness about your business. It is still a profile about you, but you can make it clear that you run a company and tell people how great your company is. The people who agree to be your friends on your profile will also become your captive audience.
Facebook fan pages
These were put there to allow people to openly promote their business, website or anything that they fancy (unless it has already been taken). This is a device that will allow you to promote your business and create social awareness with a page full of posts. People can even click the “like” button if they like your business/website. Facebook may remove a personal profile if it is all about a business, but they will not remove your Facebook fan page.
Google+ profiles
Google+ is the answer to Facebook and is the competitor that is the most like it. You may also create a personal profile and use it to create social awareness about your business. You can do things such as share content from your website or upload potentially viral images. They have around 65,000,000 unique monthly visitors, which is not as good a Facebook but is still a big number. There are still a lot of people on Google+ for you to communicate with.
Google+ Pages
This works in a very similar way to the Facebook fan page. You can create a page that is all about your business/website and post as much promotional content as you wish. It is called a page because it is like having your own web page to post promotional content on. The Facebook fan page and the Google+ page may both be indexed by the Google search engine too, so they may also create a bit of non-social-media awareness.
Twitter
This is the leading competitor to Facebook and has around 250,000,000 unique monthly visits. This is a very large audience and you can post on Twitter quite a few times per week without annoying anyone because the tweets are so small. People do not mind so much if your tweets are mostly promotional because they are so small and easy to read. It allows people to follow you, so it is better if you create a few good and interesting tweets to help keep people coming back. Twitter and Facebook are really the first places you need to be if you want to create social awareness.
YouTube
This social media network is special because it is one of the few social media networks that do not require people to log in to use it. This means that there is a large variety of users and those users may start watching videos at any time of day, for whatever reason. They do not log on to check tweets or messages; they just log on when they want a bit of entertainment. This changes the rules a little when it comes to posting as you can create social awareness without having to post on a regular basis.
This social media network will serve you better if you concentrate on quality above quantity. It has over 180,000,000 unique visitors every month, and some people use YouTube as their online TV, so it is possible to get people visiting and revisiting you on a regular basis.
Linked IN
If you want to create social awareness within the business community then LinkedIN is a very good place to start. It has around 110,000,000 unique visitors per month, and many of them have businesses or good jobs or some sort of profession. You can create social awareness in a more professional setting. Try to aim for communication with other business professionals whilst also demonstrating your own expertise.
Qzone
This is actually a social media site from China. It is only available in China, but if it were to go worldwide then it would severely worry Facebook. It has over 480,000,000 unique monthly visits in China alone, which is already more than Twitter. It allows people to share photos, publish diary pages, and listen to music. It may be wise to look into this social media site if you are selling to China, and maybe you should become acquainted with it in case it ever goes worldwide, as its audience in China is still growing. There are 1.4 billion people in China, and only 311 million people in America, so you can see how a popular Chinese social media network is going to dominate and dwarf other social media networks if it keeps growing.
This post is written by Kate Funk. She is a professional blogger and writer at www.speaken.net. She specializes in topics of interest to techno geeks and networking enthusiasts.