Wrong demographic?
Social media are the in thing – within a certain sector of the population. In planning your social media campaign it is important to work out what your market is using, as this might be quite different from the social-networking tools that you employ. For example, we run a twitter feed for one of our academic clients, that has a high take up amongst both existing and (more importantly) potential students, but no significant penetration in the staff cadre. It is potentially very useful, but not too easy to sell (see Nanofolio‘s twitter feed).
A big question for commercial sites is does having an active social media presence boost your site presence on the search engines? – The jury is still out on this. It certainly does not offer incremental improvement, but Google at least is aware of social media activity associated with your site, and does count links from Tweets to your pages – whether or not it gives them much credence is another matter! The latest upgrade to Twitter, however, allows you to add a photo to your Tweet, and makes this an attractive shop window for products in its own right (see Mobility Nationwide‘s Twitter feed)…
A big use of Twitter for many years has been the conference circuit; creating a Twitter #tag for your conference allows delegates to provide feedback in real time, and contributes to both academic debate and networking amongst delegates. At least it should, as Chad Orzel comments on his blog (the post that spurred me into writing this!):
