Social networking can be valuable to businesses

In today’s world of online social circles it’s hard to imagine any business not joining the universal scramble for a free soapbox to a wider audience. Yet many small businesses don’t see how they can benefit from social media. Not everyone has had their eyes opened by the massive opportunities for engagement and new business that tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Yell.com Reviews – along with the various blogging platforms present.

3 reasons why small businesses should consider social media

1. Word of mouth is the most powerful force of discovery, and social media is nothing more than word of mouth amplified.

2. Engage with a larger audience - As a business owner you can be guaranteed a large portion of your customers – and potential customers – are likely to spend a lot of time on social sites. Here is an opportunity for you to engage with a large audience and present the ‘human’ side of your business.

3. You don’t have to be big to be noticed  - Most areas of social media require the investment of time and not money, making it a level playing field to be noticed.

What is the starting point?

• Get a website. The first very important step is to get an online presence, your ‘store front’. Once you have a website (or even a blog) created then you are ready to get started with social media. The costs of getting a website up and running have come down dramatically recently and small businesses have a number of options available, including from Yell (Yellsites). Whichever solution you choose, make sure you can easily and cheaply make changes to your site as you have more content and news to share.

• Spend time on social sites - Once you have a business website then your next step is to spend time on a number of social sites. Spend some time listening, before you start talking and don’t forget that business owners are consumers too, so look at how other businesses are doing it. Educate yourself on social media, and then decide what you want. Jump in, experiment and learn.

• Link to your website - Think of social media as a party, a big conversation and one that you can be part of. Link your online presence (or website) from all sites you engage in back to one common place – which would be your website – or store front. So for example all those links on your Twitter and Facebook profile should take people to one place.

• Define a strategy - Strategy is a heavy and can be an expensive word. First of all make sure you have your website done, then think about how you want to use it, to which audiences, with which messages. Having a plan will give you short cuts and cut out a lot of effort later.

Key questions to ask yourself

• How much time can you invest?

• Do you have the resources to invest in social media (for example an employee)?

What are your business objectives?

• Are you looking to make more direct sales, solicit feedback or raise awareness?

• Do you have the resources to dedicate to blogging?

Common mistakes

Small business owners often make these mistakes when embarking into social media for the first time. You can learn from their mistakes so you don’t have to make them again.

• A dead blog – or one that isn’t maintained – is counter productive. Commit to finding time to put relevant and engaging content together for your blog before starting, and don’t start one if you don’t think you can commit to it.

Starting and not keeping going - if you start to get feedback and you’re not monitoring it or responding, it won’t look good.

• Familiarise yourself with the unwritten rules that often exist on social/community sites. For example, don’t go to Twitter and update it but only to advertise your business and not add any additional value.

• Patience is very important as social media is about building relationships, and this takes time. These relationships build up slowly and so the more effort you invest the more rewards you’ll reap.

The relevance of blogging

• Being human - Having a blog gives you the chance to present the human side of your business and differentiate yourself from your competitors.

• Search engine ranking - Content is crucial when it comes to your business being discovered on the web. Your business has a higher chance of being found by search engines through rich, good content.

• More engagement with customers - The use of images and video when creating your content also to helps keep it rich – and is ideal for search engine optimisation.

• Easy to publish content - A blog can be a fantastic platform to easily create excellent content.

Which social media sites and tools are right for my business?

Start with the big ones, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Flickr and Reviews/ testimonials sites.

Measuring the effectiveness of my social media

• Monitor all your feedback.

• Look at the stats on your website and see which social media sites are sending traffic to you.

• If you analyse the results of your activities you can tweak and improve them.

• There’s nothing wrong with asking for feedback and get your customers to engage with the sites you have a presence on.

Golden rules for businesses using social media

• Measure and monitor your feedback, don’t let it drift.

• Be genuine, truthful and transparent. The great thing about social media is that word of mouth spreads quickly.

• Never impersonate, just be yourself and represent your business.

Feeding the Social Media Monster! Quantity, Quality or by Stealth?

One of the first articles I penned for this column was called “What’s stopping you from Blogging”.   In the article, the main opposition I highlighted was the time commitment it takes to produce good quality content for the Social Media networks plus your own Blog.  Nothing has changed; in fact there are even more potential networks to post your own articles.  Some business owners would say that they have created a monster that has become more time consuming than their own core business. Now is the time to take stock and re-visit the basics – especially if you run a local service based company.

How to Train Your Monster?

They key question here is:  Do you have the right strategy?  Has your strategy been built on Quantity, Quality or Stealth? Fortunately, all three approaches can work providing you know what you are doing and what type of company you run.

One way to generate leads using Social Media is to populate lots of Social Media accounts with lots of re-purposed content (re-written for the particular Social Media network’s style).  By casting your net wide, you can hope, by the law of averages to attract a good number of readers and ultimately convert them to Fans, then to Customers. This can work, if you have a branded product that is available at least nationally, and preferably globally.  And this is where the mainstream Social Media networks are at their strongest.  It is more akin to broadcast advertising and works well especially if you have an intrinsically “interesting” product.  Say, based around Entertainment.  Big brands can take this approach and often hire a full time Social Media Manager to do this.

Physically local businesses like Restaurants, Bakers and Bars can do very well on Facebook Places for example, but the pitch should be for quality of reader or subscriber- not necessarily quantity. You want really loyal Fans that are going to recommend you to their local peers.  More time spent on carefully preparing posts with very high quality photography to suit Pinterest might work. A more targeted approach using a freelance professional photographer and copywriter team would be a better approach for content generation. The quality approach also works for professional service companies too.

Most local service businesses will have noticed that it can be hard to build up a big following on Facebook or Twitter.  Posts on Facebook about their Service may not be reposted and stand little chance of going viral (unless they are hugely creative).  One option would be to hire a freelance team to help with quality, but this can be expensive.  To be fair, local service business is a tough nut for Social Media alone to crack. Nevertheless, Driving Schools, for example, do well by persuading their clients to create “user generated content”. 

And that is the key to Social Media success for a local business. Get your clients to take a picture and post a “good job” message on your site and/or, their own site and you have tamed the Social Media content monster by stealth!  Social Media is a tool that works by referral, so why not cut to the chase and ask for a referral on Social Media. Of course, nothing in life is free.  In this case, you need to make sure you do a good job for your customers- but you do that anyway – so consider what small incentive you could give to your satisfied customer in return for a referral.  I find clients are overly partial to wine- what works for you?

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Myspace was the original Social Media network of any size.  Before Facebook and Twitter really got going, it was the only place to be with 10s of Millions of Subscribers, right around the world. But a failure to invest and a subtle change in fashion around 2009/10 led to its demise.  Myspace never catered for business users- indeed the only  Social Media network that did back then was LinkedIn, but it did attract a high number of creative types (a bit like Vimeo is doing now for video) and was particularly good at publicising new and up and coming bands. This is possibly why Justine Timberlake decided to invest and this month, an all new Myspace has been launched. But is it any use for small business?

This news is literally hot of the press and the new Myspace still has some Beta release wrinkles. It is a cross between Pinterest and Tumblr, with a  constantly refreshing and scrolling photo style – that makes it very suitable for smart phones and the smart phone addicted, Generation Y.  But the most striking thing about it – is that rather than scrolling vertically – Like Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest and every other Social Media Network, it scrolls – sideways!   Sideways scrolling might seem odd, but think about its use on an iPad and how you swipe with your finger (and how we have read books for hundreds of years) and suddenly it makes sense. Don’t be surprised if you see other sites offering sideways swipe in the future.

In fact, the User Interface is beautiful and loading your Personal Profile is nice and easy. During the sign up process, Myspace asks what category you would like to use. As you would expect, there are clues here as to the intended audience with a host of creative type categories: Photographer, Writer, DJ, and Musician etc and if this is your small business type, then like Vimeo, it is well worth setting up an account.  For non creative type businesses, then the nearest available category is Brand.  So while Myspace will not be for every small business, it is the next new thing and for some brands, leading edge is where they need to be.

In some respects, it does complicate, still further, the already complex set of choices for a small business, but a Social Media site dedicated to music and audio (other than Apple’s iTunes Ping) would be a useful alternative to a generic site like Facebook.

Perversely, for a site aimed at music lovers, the first reports are that uploaded audio files are too compressed and the quality is not as high as it should be. It might be that Myspace will dedicate more server space to audio in a later release, but this could be a major flaw for the particular niche.  We like the sideways scrolling, but as they used to say, “The Jukebox Jury is out”, Mr Timberlake.

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Just under a year ago, I wrote a Blog on this site called “Infographics and Social Media”.  If you have not read it, do go back and take a look. It is a good Blog, (although I say it myself!), explaining why a small business might consider publishing an Infographic and how. At the end, my recommendation is to use a friendly graphic designer. Since then companies have been busy trying to design a tool that would allow even the most cack-handed businessman the chance to create something of a professional quality – and to make it easy to share that Infographic using Social Media.  I am happy to say that Piktochart seems to be that tool.

Piktochart presents the user with starting Infographic Themes or templates that can be easily customised with your “Big Data”. The best bit is that the entry cost is free. By combining Themes with relatively easy to use text boxes, vector shapes and pictures it is possible to create your first professional looking Infographic in just 15-30 minutes. Of course, with the right package,  you can add your logo, change things like font style and even whole colour palette selection to mimic your brand colours and design style.

One you have done this, you can export your Infographic direct to your web site or share by Facebook or Twitter etc. But where this very interesting is that, Piktochart are working on making their Infographics SEO friendly.  In other words, somehow allowing Google to search and index the content of an Infographic. Whether this is done with additional Tags or otherwise automatically by parsing the actual text in your chart is not clear. But however it is achieved, it is a nice trick and could be very useful for your SEO natural listing effort. Beyond this, Piktochart are looking at making certain elements “Interactive”. That is, allowing usually static Infographic design elements to move when a cursor is rolled over etc.  Now interestingly, animation has been available on PowerPoint slides for many years. It has not really caught on, and can be a major distraction in the middle of an important client presentation say.  But it does seem like a little interaction would go a long way in making a complex Infographic shine- providing it is used with care.

For the free package, Piktochart will insert what they call a “water mark” in the final exported Infographic, but this is discreet and kept out of the picture (excuse the pun!).  The limitations are really around the number of starting Themes you can choose from (3 on the free package) and the related, limited colour and image selection available.

Obviously, Piktochart would like users to trial the system and then upgrade to the $29/month package where these restrictions are lifted – but you have to hand it to Pictochart, you could upgrade for a month to produce a single fully customised chart and then down grade.

For the small business user with some “big data” to communicate it makes a lot of sense to use an Infographic and the pricing model of Piktochart would certainly encourage take up. But some small business owners might say they simply do have any “big data” of their own to present. In this case, I would recommend that “big data” from the relevant Trade Association is obtained and used to create a Press Release with the Piktochart Infographic at its heart. If well thought through, the chart will capture broad attention and the rest of the Press Release (with distribution through Social Media) will capture specific attention for your local business. Not only is this a fun and interesting way to present “big data”.  In carrying out the Trade Association research, you might just learn new and useful something yourself.  Give it a try!

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If you have searched for video content recently, the chances are that you were directed to a YouTube site. But sometimes you will have come across Vimeo. Vimeo is video hosting site that has a free to use option with Social Media community features- just like YouTube which make it an interesting choice – for some types of business.

YouTube has many, many more subscribers and users than Vimeo and there perhaps is the main difference and reason to consider Vimeo. Vimeo has become a site that attracts a “certain kind of customer” and it is suggested that customers of Vimeo are likely to be more creative types; designers, graphic artists, musicians and those who just fancy themselves as a bit different from the crowd.

To understand what this means, it is perhaps best to think of the way that Apple Computers successfully differentiated their brand by targeting “creative types” both in their branding, but also in their functionality. Apple Computers were highly specified with large hard drives and fast bespoke processors to handle what used to be intensive video and graphic processing tasks. Consequently, it was not uncommon to visits a design agency and to find all staff using Apple machines (even the Accountants!).

Well Vimeo has successfully attained this position with creative types, none more so than with Bands and Musicians.

So should your average small business use Vimeo?   If your business is selling services or technology to creative types, then yes, definitely. But bear in mind that the typical video production standard is a little higher than would be seen on YouTube and to really make a splash, you will probably need to hire a professional video production agent.

Vimeo has another couple of advantages over YouTube. The first is that your Vimeo hosted video will not be surrounded by other advertiser’s clutter and distraction.  This might be important to your business, especially if on YouTube, your nearest competitor might be featured right next to you.

The second is that Vimeo does not seem to attract the “Trolls”.  That is, those anonymous people who deliberately leave rude and spiteful comment about your company or product, often without even having first hand knowledge of your business. The problem is that some of your potential customers might see this on YouTube and assume it is real.

So if Vimeo is so good, why don’t more companies use it?  Well Vimeo is growing, but the fact is that to get the best out of Vimeo you need to buy the Pro version at $200 per year.  In addition, some would also say that Vimeo doesn’t bring the SEO advantages that YouTube brings through its linkages with Google.

So on balance, for most small business, Vimeo is an add-on to a YouTube campaign. If you have a video made for YouTube, by all means open a free account with Vimeo and load it up there too. (There are some usage limit and subject restrictions to keep an eye on).  The exception being if you target the creative businesses – or you are a creative business yourself. Then pay the $200 and get on Vimeo. Who knows, you could be the only big fish in the small Vimeo video pond.

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Keep track of your social media numbers with this free template

While there is no doubt that the likes of Facebook and Twitter will continue to grow, the  phenomenal growth of Instagram and Pinterest have shown that there are rather large niches that Facebook did not cover that well. (Well OK, so Facebook has now bought Instagram). In the case of Instagram, growth was driven by the demand for primarily visual media consumed on a smart mobile device – and increasing use of mobile consumption is itself still a significant trend in 2013. But there are true niche and some geographically local Social Media Networks that small businesses in the UK might do well to attend to if they want to keep ahead of the Social Media curve in 2013.

An excellent example of both a niche and a kind of localised Social Media Network is, “mapmyride.com”.  The simple idea is that members can log-in to find a cycle route recommended by another member in a particular area.  Although the site is dominated by rides based in the US, it is only a matter of time before there is significant take up of this service in the UK.  For example, there are already hundreds of routes specified around London, but no so many around Sheffield or York.  The interesting part is that the routes are “community self generated”.  As more members join, the quality and depth of routes available improves exponentially. Other niche Social Media Networks include those focused on Food and Eating out.  For example, “Foodspotting.com”. There are also micro niche networks focused on exclusivity like “Top 1%”, not mention the many Dating and Introduction Networks of various intent and nature.

In theory, there could be as many niche and local Social Networks to join (and exploit as a small business) as there are ideas, hobbies and organisations. The point for the typical small business sis that it might be easier to make a splash as a big fish in a small pond than trying to batter your way through the clutter on a generalised site like Facebook. It makes sense, especially if you run a business that serves a community of like minded individuals or if your niche content expertise can draw a loyal crowd.

Add to this the fact that it is now  relatively easy to start your own fully functioning Social Media Network with an application like, “Buddy Press” and the opportunities for a small or local business with vision are endless.  And of course, the small business that has the will to start a niche network will own all the customer data (rather than Facebook or Twitter).  Now that is the real asset!

While there have been niche forums and niche bulletin board sites ever since the Internet was invented, interestingly, it has been the growth of Facebook itself and applications that allow users to verify them easily using their Facebook Profile that has enabled the swift take up of niche Social Media Networks.  So everything is in place to make 2013 your year to luanch a successful niche network.  Good Luck!

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WordPress Themes are relatively small programs that have been designed to work with the standard Word Press Blog and allow the enthusiastic amateur to change items such as background colour, font styles and to upload logos without knowing any code. Often they will come pre-loaded with Plug Ins and other specialist features depending on the Theme. And that is the point.  All Themes are different and are themselves designed to appeal to a particular industry or to deliver a particular set of requirements.  The good news is that Themes do not cost a great deal of money.  Perhaps £35 and some quiet good ones are Free! And with care it is possible to swap between Themes if you do not like the results..

So for example, you might decide that you need a News Paper or Magazine Theme and you can search for this and find that many third party developers produce a Theme that lets the user generate and then customise a beautiful looking template. Variations on this might be delivered complete with a very modern or perhaps a vintage theme, or be designed to promote a local band, for example. The Theme will have a Control Panel that allows you to customise further.  It is actually quite rewarding if you have time and you should allow couple of hours to get something looking right for your business.Other Themes are designed to allow creative companies and agencies to show off their work in a “Portfolio” effect. They include full multi media capability (Text, Images, Video and Audio) all embedded within the Theme. (Meaning that a customer does not leave your site to view a YouTube video). Other types of Theme allow you create Blogs that are basically web shops with some surprisingly good commerce features built in.

A really important Theme feature to look out for is, “Responsiveness”.  A responsive Theme means that the Blog will automatically scale and look right on a PC, on a Mobile phone or on an iPad. That said, if your audience is never likely to look at your Blog on a mobile phone, choose a Fixed layout. It will load much faster and that can be useful in certain circumstances. (Especially, if you are trying to sell something)

The important thing to remember is that, all Word Press Themes are somewhat of a compromise. The compromise is the balance between Functionality, Cost and Quality. For example, if you decide to buy an eCommerce theme, it will likely be adequate for most small time activity, but it will not scale for all your worldwide shipping needs. In which case you will need to buy, or have built, a stand alone eCommerce facility.

In the end you do get what you pay for.  If you want something truly unique, you will need to pay a web designer to code it for you!

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Pinterest has been a big hit with individuals with well over 25 million accounts now active. This makes it the third biggest Social Media Network after Facebook and Twitter and ahead of LinkedIn.  As I have always said, if you want to catch fish, go where the fish are, so I think now is the time for small and local business to take the plunge and to create a Business Page on Pinterest.  The process is very straight forward, requiring you only to enter a few details about the nature and intent of your business and then to verify your account. Once you have done this, you can make your first post to Pinterest and it will appear with a little symbol showing that you are a bone-fide company.

I suppose the question is what to post?  Any striking images about the output of your business would be a good start.  If you have been running a Facebook account, it might be useful to look at your Posts and see if you can re-Post something to Pinterest.

Note that if you were ahead of the curve and already have a personal Pinterest account, you can and should convert to a Pinterest Business Page- just as in the same way that many businesses that had a personal Facebook account now use a Facebook Business Page. But what do you get as a Pinterest Business page Account?  Well apart from the verification and a little free publicity, the answer is not very much – yet.    But hang on; let’s not ignore the possibility to obtain free publicity in an environment where there may not be much business competition for your products and services.

Yes, if you are selling designer cup cakes, the chances are that in no way will you have “first mover advantage” on  Pinterest (quite the reverse in fact!). But if you are selling a novel and environmentally friendly way to clean conservatories, for example, you could be on to a winner.  What you will need really is to have some good “before and after” photographs- preferably with a human interest story attached.  In fact, maybe this is the time to invest in obtaining some professional quality photography for your business.   Yes, anyone can take a technically good photograph these days, but it is still an art to create a photograph of a mundane subject and make it striking enough so  that a complete stranger will notice it and share it on Pinterest by “re-pinning” it.

Beyond that, we can expect Pinterest to start to build out useful features for their Business Page customers.  What those features will be – we will have to wait and see, but Pinterest is very easy and stylish to use , and right now, with a little effort,  your Business Page will have nice medium to long term rewards.

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They have a term for it: The Content Wall. It is akin to the age old problem of “writers’ block”.  But it is easy to underestimate how important this aspect of Social Media Marketing is until you have tried building an audience on Twitter or Facebook yourself. The things is, anyone can open a Facebook Page or a Twitter site and start posting right away. One of the attractions is how deceptively easy it is to put out content about your industry or favourite commercial topic.  But sooner or later, even the best of us hit a content wall. The time when you just have nothing left to say that is sufficiently interesting to your audience.  Inevitably the rate of growth of your fan base will then falter. This is the time to turn to some of the curation tools on the Internet. This week, I am going to look at Scoop.it.

Scoop.it is a tool that does a couple of things really well:

1)      It allows you to automatically search for third party content on your topic or industry in a similar way that Google Reader does on a PC or my6sense does as a Mobile App.

2)      It then allows you to seamlessly present and share that content via say, Facebook or Google+  to your audience in an efficient and attractive “Magazine” format

If you are careful about setting your own search criteria such that it only returns really good quality information and you are careful to publish your content on a regular basis then, with luck you will build up an audience of like minded individuals as Followers. In a commercial environment, there is a good chance that those Followers could be persuaded to visit your web store or physical outlet to buy something, or ask for a quote in the case of a service business.

Your Followers are relying on your specialist “curation” of content from across the web, saving them time and effort.  The word “curation” is a bit odd, but if you think of the way that a Museum owner/ Director would spend his/her time thinking about what exhibits would represent the finest in their category, you get a better sense of the word. 

Curation works really well if you are an industry guru or hobby specialist.  But even if you are not the top industry guru, the very process of selecting and refining your search criteria, then building your own Scoop.it interest sub-category will encourage you to pick up the latest “gen” and gossip from your specialist subject area.  After a while, the enthusiatic amateur curator becomes a guru!

Scoop.it is free for everyday curation as required of the enthusiast, but more sophisticated versions are available on a subscription basis.  For the Professional, the cost is $12.99 /month and allows you, in particular, to share to your own WordPress Blog and also provides analytics. While the Business version is $79/month and will allow you to properly brand the curated content as though it is from your own business.

So Scoop.it make it easy for the small business owner to start out in the curation market with their free version. And with this, as an absolute minimum, where once you would have hit the “Content Wall”, you will now have self-created a valuable source of ideas to further populate the pages of your own Blog or YouTube channel.  Then,  if you like the Scoop.it magazine format, you can go on to make it the hub of all your Social Media posting activity too. What’s not to like?

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Outside of pure retail and excluding impulse or emergency need purchases, most businesses have to work hard to create a sales pipeline. In a typical face to face sales model, a sales person will have to contact maybe 100 people by phone to get 5 appointments to make one sale. This is the “1% Conversion rule”. 1% of prospects who have listened to you and understood your offering will buy. But can the use of Social Media change this percentage?  Is there an exception to the 1% rule

On the web, where there is less push from a real sales person, the same 1% Conversion Rule applies. A typical corporate website will have to attract 1,000 people browsing, of whom 100 might then click through to the shopping or e-commerce part of the website and 1% will buy. Even if one utilises e-mail, the same 1% rule applies. Mail 10,000 prospects and 1,000 will open the mail and 100 will buy (if you have a product that prospects actually want to buy!).  It is a depressing fact of sales life in the over communicated environment in which we have to make sales.

But Social Media is a proven method of breaking the 1% Conversion Rule. More specifically only good and consistent use of Social Media techniques will enable you to break the rule.

Cold calling prospects and emailing cold lists is essentially an interruption based method of generating sales, sometimes called Outbound Marketing.  But it could be easily argued, that traditional display, poster and even radio and TV advertising is also a subset of Interruption Marketing. The advertiser is trying to interrupt a passer by with a hope of converting them to a prospect. The funny thing is that even poster and TV advertising follows the 1% Conversion rule. It is just that the starting numbers are often much bigger!

What Social Media for Business use is trying to do is to encourage prospects to identify themselves in advance of you trying to convert them.  In other words, Social Media is about encouraging shy prospects to put up their hands and say,  “Yes- I am interested”!   Most Social Media begins with the posting of an interesting or funny (sometimes controversial) position or statement. With luck you will attract a few Followers.  By engaging with these Followers (we will call them prospects now) over time, in what is a very soft sales technique, you are creating conditions whereby more and more prospects will hopefully gather around a unifying topic (that you chose to start) and self identify. Whether they chose to continue to engage with you and your brand depends on how engaging your content is.   This is sometimes called Inbound Marketing.  In fishing terms, you are throwing ground bait!  Once enough fish have gathered you can entice them with the real bait and hook them into a sale!

Looking at the 1% Conversion rule, where Social Media has helped, is in assembling a targeted group of prospects. If you were able to mail 1000 of them, perhaps 300 rather than 100 would open your mail. Then if your offer is just the same, you would expect 3 people to buy.  Suddenly the 1% Conversion rule becomes the 3% Conversion Rule. But it gets better than this, because, if you have been doing your homework, during the all important engagement process, perhaps you may have listened to your prospects and subtly changed your offer.  Now when you mail 1,000 people, 300 people see it, but 2% buy and the Conversion Rule becomes 6%. And if those 6% who buy, endorse your product or service on Social Media, well that could double sales again, so now you have a 12% Conversion Rule!

Of course there are other ways to break the 1% Conversion Rule. You could make your offer even better by lowering your price or increasing the amount delivered for the same price. Essentially, a race to the bottom, but what centuries of commerce have shown is that people like to buy from people they know and trust. Social Media is just a way of quickly building trust with a wide audience that would have been impossible only a few years ago. And best of all, it is free!

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Where Skype does differ from say Facebook or Twitter is that it does not leave a public trail that can be searched.  While this is good for personal use, it does not help members of the general public to find you, or for you to find members of the general public easily.  Generally, you have to know the Skype address of the party you wish to connect to in advance or at least be invited to the call. To repeat, Skype is private in a way that Facebook and Twitter are not. Yes, you can have private Groups on Facebook, but the default position on Facebook is to make posts public and searchable. If your definition of Social Media means “Public Media” then Skype is not Social Media.

Because Skype is essentially private, there isn’t an emphasis selling adverts- which itself is a welcome feature- assuming you are not a business trying to advertise!

Of course, Microsoft, the not so new owners of Skype, could easily turn Skype in  to more of a standard Social Media experience. For example, by allowing users to post private conversations (and even video) to a public version of Skype.  If this was made searchable by Google using tags, then it would feel much more like a typical Social Media Network.  But Microsoft have been smart about this and instead are emphasising the difference.  Skype are advertising how much better, “real face to face” video is for keeping in touch with loved ones than using short “text” speech, for example.

But maybe there is a way to combine both aspects of a Public Social network like Facebook and a Private Social Network like Skype. Facebook is already close to Microsoft in a business sense.  If you use the Facebook search facility you are using Bing, a Microsoft product. And since 2011, Facebook has made Skype available as part of the Facebook experience. You can Skype call Friends directly from Facebook and see Facebook posts in Skype.

The point is that you can search for contacts on the public Facebook , engage with  them and the when you have built up trust, start a private Skype conversation. Is this the best of both worlds for business use?

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