Well….this complicated. (click to enlarge, you’ll need to!)
The slide, produced by Buddy Media, documents most of the sites and areas which would be involved in a really comprehensive social media campaign and frankly, it’s enough to make anyone want to return to the good ol’ days of print-only advertising.
Most SME and third sector marketers lack the time and budget to engage with much of this. A simple monitoring dashboard can cover the basics of the Social Intelligence field, for instance, while the new Social Ad networks seem to be in a completely different realm.
There’s an interesting lesson here, though, As soon as you move much beyond the top ten or so big sites (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Blogger etc), having a conversation about “social media” becomes a slippery concept.
We spotted pretty quickly that Pinterest isn’t on the slide, neither does Scoop.it appear in the Content Curation section – and these are both sites we work with currently either for ourselves or clients, but they’re obviously not a major feature for the slide author.
We think the sites listed here are mostly focused on big brands, which makes sense since Buddy collaborates with eight of the top ten global advertisers. However, the key point is this: you could have five skilled digital marketing experts working in various areas of social media, and their knowledge might not overlap much. So, the next time you bring up that cool niche tool you discovered and your agency contact seems confused, give them a break!
The slide is also a great illustration that nobody out there can possibly keep on top of all of this. If you’re looking for help with your social media, it’s really important to make sure there’s a good match between your budget / online marketing ambition, and the environment your chosen agency is used to – otherwise you could both be talking a very different language.