16 Differences Between Social Media and Traditional Media

Major Differences Between Social Media and Traditional Media

These differences aren’t just interesting — understanding how social media is different from traditional media has a major impact on whether you’re successful with social media. Run your social media campaign like your traditional media campaign and you’re likely to see more damage to your brand reputation than benefit and you’ll waste a lot of money doing it.

   Social Media                                                                                 Traditional Media

Highlights: How Social Media is Different

How social media provides value

If you think about it, it’s pretty obvious that traditional media provides value through subsidizing content — free TV and radio programs, lower-cost magazines, and chances to win prizes. In exchange for this content or other value, we ALLOW advertisers to interrupt our day to tell us about their products.

The difference is that social media — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc — are already FREE. So, advertisers can’t expect us to allow them to interrupt us with commercial messages. I mean, face it, no one really LIKES commercial!

So, the key to making social media work is to provide some other type of value — be it entertainment, information, support, or other types of rewards — in exchange for hearing your commercial message. And, the ratio can’t be 1:1. You HAVE to provide about 90% value to 10% commercial message. A good example is Taylor Swift. She shares cuts from her albums before they’re available in stores as well as insider information about music and bands.

Social media is ALL about community

Social networks increasingly replace more traditional communities and this is what draws billions of people into social networks and convinces them to spend significant time engaging in the social network. The trick of social media marketing success is to JOIN this community and harness its power.

So, rather than disrupting the conversation, join the conversation. Become an integral part of the community — someone everyone recognizes and welcomes because you share fun and interesting things with them. Guy Kawasaki is a master of this and employes a staff to find and share interesting images, videos, and news at Alltop and really interesting stuff is posted as “Holy Kaw”.

Use the community. Studies and experience show people engage more when they’re a part of something. So, ask the community to contribute content such as a cool video or suggestions for a brand name. For instance, I built a brand community on Facebook called my Social Media Marketing Tribe. Anyone can join and we share interesting tips we find, ask questions, get support for projects we’re working on, etc.

One on one marketing

While most advertising (traditional media) is designed for mass consumption, social media involves one on one marketing. That means the message should appear addressed to individual users. Hence, marketers need to understand their target market ON EACH NETWORK so messages appear tailored to the individual. While you may have a broad target market, the ones on Facebook may be entirely different from the ones on YouTube and adapting your approach in each network is key to your success.

What Do YOU Think?

1. Do you see other differences between social media marketing and traditional media marketing?
2. How are you achieving social media marketing success?

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Read more: Live ‘n Kickin: Social Media Makes Claims on Traditional Media Territory