Every successful marketing campaign in the twenty first century must in some way take into account social media. And with the new breed of social media tools available today, video plays a very significant role in connecting with customers and finding new leads for your business.

The biggest social media sites on the web today include Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Of these big three social media portals, LinkedIn is geared primarily toward the professional business community. The community that uses LinkedIn is typically concerned with the business world and interests that are specific to that context. Many users’ profiles are essentially geared to be their resumes or business service pitches. The goal is to connect with other professionals in similar topical social networks that can lead to new peer relationships, employee or employer relationships, or business partner relationships. The key to taking full advantage of the marketing opportunities in this space starts with your profile. Building a killer LinkedIn profile is critical to getting serious business contacts. The addition of a small video about yourself or your company helps make a personal connection with potential clients or partners and can be very important to building meaningful contact networks.

Discussion groups are also very important to LinkedIn as they help show the community that you are not just trolling for sales, or lurking for marketing demographics, but that you are truly a part of the larger community conversation. Joining existing discussion groups and even creating some of your own discussion groups are great ways to integrate into the LinkedIn community.


Facebook is the big dog on the block right now in terms of social media portals. Everyone from your family and friends to your religious center, local government and neighborhood restaurant have a presence out on Facebook. Facebook has some great tools for connecting with people, including most recently a number of tools for connecting in real time over video chat. Tools like ooVoo make it simple for Facebook users to log into their Facebook page and then with a couple button clicks begin a web video chat session right over the Facebook application. Social video chat is a great way to connect with your customers on a number of levels. First, creating a personal presence with face to face contact with your customers and business partners cannot be underestimated. This is in many ways a game changer in the way that customers interact with online business partners.
Also, this changes the kind of skills required for marketing and sales types as well, as the old time skills of public speaking, body language and eye contact come back to the fore of important business skills. Video chat can be used for one on one customer service scenarios that can offer a much more genuine experience than text chat, though text chat can still be incorporated into your sessions for some special occasions when needed. Since ooVoo in particular can support up to twelve simultaneous users in the same video chat session, ooVoo can be a great platform for giving presentations or training sessions. For remote workers, teams can get together via video chat on a regular basis for status meetings as well, making it much easier for the team to relate together.

For Twitter, the same rules apply as for LinkedIn concerning the entry into the conversation. Twitter is a unique way to stay in constant contact with your customers, clients, business partners and team mates all throughout the day. Sending relevant topical links to you followers and offering customer support to those who ask are great ways to make your Twitter experience enhance your overall social media marketing presence.