The Journey from Traditional Networking to Social Media
This age-old question has popped up time and again during my entire career. Established businesses usually have trouble transitioning from the more traditional practices towards the advanced and recent developments in the marketing and digital world. Let us look deeper as to what Social Media is all about, and how it can help your business.
Let us first understand the term ‘Social Media’. From the world ‘social’ we understand that it has more to do with people i.e. friends, family, peers and colleagues. ‘Media’ is just a technological term that gives us various digital platforms to deal with people. I started my career as an entrepreneur years from now; my first venture was an e-commerce company Etradersglobal which provided an online platform for all the traders to display and advertise the product. As a budding entrepreneur, I always stuck to the tried and tested methods and never thought about the transitioning towards the recent developments of the marketing world. As a result, the venture failed. I couldn’t understand what the reason behind it as I was religious following all the tricks of the trade that have already been proven successful.
Those were the days where there was a buzz about Social Media and a lot of platforms were being introduced with different purposes. As a knowledge-enthusiast and a person who always wanted to stay updated I joined all the social media platforms and started exploring them. I came across a lot of people doing so, some old and some new. I realized Social Media was one of the easy ways to stay connected without having to invest much time socializing. It was a platform where I could stay in touch with everyone, including friends, family, colleagues etc. Even during those days, I was still looking for my next business opportunity. Let me tell you, I have always had this knack for entrepreneurship and nothing else fascinated me more than wanting in indulge in something that is my own. I kept meeting a lot of people, discussing ideas and continued looking for opportunities. I was investing a lot of my time and money in socializing, meeting new people and trying to build my network. This led me to realize, Social Media does just that for me, more than anything else, at much cheaper prices.
This realization let me to explore the depths and insights of Social Media. To start with, I wanted to get myself educated on it, which led me to enroll for a diploma in Social Media from a reputed University in the United Kingdom. Every session, every class was a new learning experience. I learned how social media is not just a socializing platform but also a platform to market by business and opportunities. Slowly I started developing a passion for Social Media which combined with my instinct for entrepreneurship and led to my next venture, Mystic Social Media.
By now I understood one thing; Social Media is based around the principle of socializing and networking. During my trial and error period, the business and opportunities I gained were more from within my network, referral and the people I knew. On thinking about it further, I realized this is because there was always a consistent mode of communication, feedback and reviews when interlinked with each other. Social Media does exactly that, it gives you and your customers a platform, a consistent mode of communication, feedback and reviews. Not just that, if you think of it from the ‘Pyramid’ system of marketing, it consistently keeps building your network through reviews, referrals and your online reputation which is available for the world to see.
Thus, I could clearly see and understand what Social Media could do for me, for my business and for any other business I wanted to partner with. Years down the line, Social Media consistently evolved and so did I along with it. It helped me realize my dream of entrepreneurship and added value to it. My initial venture, Mystic Social Media is now Mystic Advertising, a full-fledged advertising agency that deals with all forms of integrated marketing communications. It has helped me serve 500+ clients and still keeps growing with every passing day. If it could have done that for me, why wouldn’t it for any other business? This is the simplest deliberation I can give of the age-old question, ‘Why Social Media?’
We would continue to study the subject in my next few articles where I would provide deeper insights on Social Media and its uses for any other industry.
