Social Media

Social Media marketing is the use of web-based social platforms to turn communication into interactive dialogue. The most popular types of social media websites are:



Social networks - websites such as Facebook, MySpace and for the business community LinkedIn, allow you to create a personal profile about yourself then chat, discuss and share information with others such as friends and family.



Video sharing - video-sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo allow you to upload and share your personal videos with the audience of internet users.



Photo sharing - websites like Flickr enable you to upload images and pictures to a personal account, which can then be viewed by web browsers anywhere across the globe.

Wikis - allow you to create, edit and share information about a subject or topic. Wikipedia, for instance, is the world’s biggest online dictionary and Quora is the definitive questions and answers destination online. 


News aggregators – such as Reuters, Bloomberg, The Huffington Post and Google News provide a list of the latest news stories published from a range of different websites. This is not to be confused with social bookmarking sites.

Social bookmarking - social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Reddit and Tumblr allow users to publicly bookmark web pages they find valuable in order to share them with friends and other internet users.



Online gaming - social games such as Farmville, Halo and World of Warcraft enable you to play with, or against, other online gamers wherever they may be located in the world, providing they have access to an internet connection. 


Microblogs - websites such as Twitter allow you to post microblog posts to announce what you are currently doing. However geolocation based social networks such as FourSquare and Gowalla allow you to ‘check-in’ to different places and announce what you are currently doing at each location. 


Of course this list is not exhaustive and the social media landscape is full of other websites that allow you to publish, share, discuss, broadcast, and play content. Social media is incredibly fast-moving and everything happens in real time! To keep in touch with all the latest news and happenings from the social media world, tune into the Graphic Alliance blog. 

We help clients to monitor and listen into social media conversations about their brand, products, services, competitors, and area of interest. Regular social media audits, influencer research and ongoing social media monitoring help clients to appreciate the amount of chatter and what the conversation topics are. Using our social media analysis and monitoring tools, we are able to identify the underlying issues and sentiments, the opinion-formers having the conversations, and what actions we can take as a result.


On behalf of the client, Graphic Alliance staff can assist the client with engaging in social media conversations in order to garner brand advocacy and positive word of mouth. This can be achieved through social media campaigns, brand-building programmes, community building and management, social applications, direct or broadcast response and online reputation management. The social media team at Graphic Alliance, led by Samm Compton and Sophia Bach-Neilson, pride themselves on understanding their brands and creative digital marketing communications.