by Christina Pomoni

Created on: May 15, 2009   Last Updated: May 16, 2009

Branding readership in tight economic times is hard at best, and impossible if editors do not get the immense power of online audiences. Internet power is no secret and social media may leverage the exposure that, rather decreasingly, the news industry has via newspapers and magazines.

The role of social media in audience building has gradually become significant. Their viral power has overwhelmed the remarkable sway of newspapers and has managed to impose its influence on millions of readers, who, in the plethora of information, know where to look for the best stories around.

As much as it's about starting conversations, social media is equally as much about building relationships. Requiring dedicated resources to enable the communication on a one on one level with the audience, social media construct dynamic social circles within the industry space. This dedicated team of individuals manages friends' lists, writes comments, joins community forums and is active in social networking sites. In some cases and depending on the industry, there are dedicated experts for specific fields who provide the right answers.

By and large, social media tools offer strong visibility in multiple channels and promotion of own work via different functions. In particular:

PASSPORTS

Passports are accounts that support social networking so as to extend personal branding. Some of the best known social networking platforms are Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, StumbleUpon, Digg, Wordpress, del.icio.us, Technorati, LinkedIn, and Plaxo. All these websites offer free registration and broad visibility that gives a lot of opportunities for networking and promoting own articles, photos, videos and bookmarks.

BLOGS

Blogging is the new tool to develop a personal brand. Via a home based website, anyone can create an easy-to-remember, easy-to-spell, content-suitable domain name and post own writings. Professional writers use professional layouts and promote themselves in the about you page adding details about their business so as to be more than an ordinary social media dilettante. Also, blogs feature the use of widgets in the sidebar which connect the blog with major top search engines.

The content of a blog should be renewed regularly, at least three times per week. Typically, blogs are followed by regular readers and, hence, the writer should expose consistency not only in the quality of writing, but also in the quantity. Pieces should be brief with visual breaks so that are easily absorbed by readers, yet passionately and insightfully written.

COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION

Participating in a website community compensates a writer's hard work. Communication with other members offers the opportunity to interact directly and makes it easy to get acquainted with diverse blogs and writing projects. Functioning like a small society within the vast Internet world, community participation measures a writer's efforts in building an audience and grows out his writings as a natural extension of his personality.

Without a doubt, social media are more than search engines. It takes time and effort to attract new and appreciative audiences, to bring all sources together and to construct cyberconnections that can create the feeling of real reading experience. Reproducing the feeling of flipping through the pages of a newspaper, while sitting in front of a computer screen is an intricate task. However, what makes social media so powerful and influential is that people engaged in social media industry have found the way to do this systematically, rather than relying on circumstantial luck.

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