Like all other mediums in the virtual world, social media is nothing more than a place.

The search engines are places where people are looking for things, sort of like libraries, they come in knowing what it is they’re looking for, the question is where they are going to find it. A social medium however isn’t a place where people are looking for things, it’s a place where people are sharing things. If you drill that down, people sharing things with one another is in essence, a conversation – social media is a vast collection of conversations. In the social world, people will bring up different topics, points of interest, they will say something about it, comment back and forth…sound familiar yet? This is what happens any time two or more people engage in a conversation. It’s conversing – nothing more and nothing less.

Companies need to consider these social environments because, well, businesses want to be a part of people’s conversations. Whether a business would like to promote core services, their philosophy, seasonal promotions, or anything else for that matter, social media is one place that those seeds are planted in order to proliferate these various messages. Business owners will sometimes put a sign in their window with the hopes of letting people know about the latest promotion or simply that “something” is happening inside. Social media is that window in the virtual world, businesses just need to know how to effectively move that sign from their physical window to its social equivalent.