Chapter 9. Using Social Media

In 2009 and 2010, social media went mainstream. Companies, products, and nonprofits rushed to establish presences on Facebook, Twitter, and media repositories such as Flickr and YouTube. If they already had blogs, the streams of bite-size messages on Twitter and Facebook gave those blogs new audiences. Organizations discovered that if they published a steady stream of appealing content, customers and influencers would pay attention to them—and if a piece of content “went viral,” that organization’s brand would spread far and wide. For free!

Well, not really for free.