Q: What is social media?
A: Online communities, formed around shared interests or purposes, within which individuals establish relationships and move flexibly between the roles of audience and author.
A good social media campaign is an extremely cost-effective platform for marketing a brand or product. Facebook is the second-most popular visited website in the UK after Google; UK internet traffic to Twitter increased by nearly 1000 per cent between January 2008 and January 2009.
Increasingly organisations and enterprises are using social media networks to raise awareness of their brands and products by creating communities around them. These members provide instant feedback, buy new products when they come out and can work brands and products through their online social networks without any reward. Social recommendation engines and bookmarking services, such as StumbleUpon and reddit, are also proving valuable.