Before the emergence of Facebook, the very phrase “social media consultant” made little or no sense to the average person. However, businesses have now identified social networks as a credible way to market their products and services. Better still, private individuals are also now making a living advising companies and small businesses on how to better use Facebook and other social networking sites.
Today, the average social media consultant focuses on transforming organizations through social media by helping companies and businesses use social technologies to connect people within their organisations. The overall aim is to help promote and build some sort of intra-organisational community feeling for example, by assisting workers who are doing mutually beneficial things to know of each other’s work and to get in touch to share ideas and skills.
Perhaps another obvious application of social media consultancy is in marketing. As a result of what could be called ‘the Facebook effect’, companies and organisations around the world can use the site for targeted advertising and marketing which can be based on the extremely exact demographic data volunteered by an individual. Before the advent of social media, such efforts were only based on a mixture of what is known as educated guessing and expensive research. However, there is now an audience that makes itself a target and inadvertently responsible for the rise of social media consultants in the twenty-first century.