Social publishing seems to be something that has taken off in different areas of online. So what makes it so successful? Why does it work? It does seem to be an awful lot of writing for such little outcome. From blogging to micro-blogging, from Wikis to Widgets, Social publishing can help your business and/or brand in different ways. It won’t necessarily show you direct impact on the bottom line (although sometimes it can), but it will still benefit your business in the same way as regular marketing and PR.

How can I make social publishing work for me?
Social publishing can work for all businesses; it just depends on your business objectives on which platform/technology you should use and how you execute your campaign. You need to consider the different criteria on why you should use certain publishing styles to meet these:

• Communication
• Marketing (SEO, viral, etc)
• Brand equity
• Positioning/expertise in a specialist field
• Customer engagement

You may have more than one reason to why you think your business needs to use social publishing platforms and that’s absolutely fine. However, it is important to know what your objectives are upfront so that you can leverage on this type of social media to its full effect.

Social publishing is being used more and more in addition to, or sometimes even replacing, traditional PR. The ability to use social publishing, its users and its audience can be a powerful way to collaborate and/or communicate with your customers.

Communication
This being one of the most obvious forms of social publishing interaction with your customers. Social publishing allows the opportunity to talk to your customers/potential customers about information. It gives the opportunity to also increase/decrease visibility of information in accordance to the needs to the business.

Marketing
There are a number of ways in which Social publishing platforms can be used to help create/promote viral campaigns as well as being a good form of regular digital marketing. One of the most obvious forms of marketing interaction in social publishing is micro-blogging. You can easily maintain a micro-blog to help feed small pieces of information/updates to customers to help them identify with useful offers or information.

Brand equity
With the ability to customise and style templates on new platforms, the opportunity to increase brand equity and exposure starts to become a lot easier using online. The ability to strengthen your brand presence is exponential, especially if combined with a suitable viral campaign (i.e. template creation).

Positioning/expertise in a specialist field
Blogging was renowned for the ability to share experiences as an online journal but over recent years there has been a massive increase in the amount of specialist blogs that provide tailored, relevant information to online communities. Companies are also using this method as the preferred tool for communicating news/updates with their customers. Not only do blogs showcase specialist knowledge, but they can also help leverage positioning against your key competitors, showcasing how your business holds up against other industry players.

Customer engagement
Customer engagement is a hot topic at present which seems to be the crux between success and failure online. Wikis and forums (if appropriate) are just a couple of ways in which you can get customers to engage and interact with your brand via social publishing.

The opportunities are available; it is just a case of ensuring that you use these mediums that are appropriate to you. The application of technology, as in real life, is the most important part of success online.