Social Media Marketing

The Latest Buzz on The Internet

Social Media is the latest buzz online.  With sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and others, we can gather with people all over the world and discuss just about anything.  We can find people from our past, catch up with old friends and make new ones.  We can discuss our jobs, families, hobbies and most important to business owners, the products we buy or are thinking of buying.  We are no longer forced to believe the “In Your Face Advertising” of the past; now we just log into Facebook and find out who likes or dislikes a product we are thinking of buying.  So what does this mean to business owners?  It is a whole new arena for marketing our products and services. 

Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks”. Social Media is a shorter top-level term that describes the space overall, and covers the activities around social interaction, content, videos, images and audio exposure.

Social media marketing can help you increase the activity around these top goals:

* Website traffic and user behavior
* Conversion and sales tracking
* Page views, ad exposure
* Growing brand awareness
* Creating a positive brand association and keeping it there
* Business development and a broader customer reach

According to Lloyd Salmons, first chairman of the Internet Advertising Bureau social media council "Social media isn't just about big networks like Facebook and MySpace, it's about brands having conversations."
Social media marketing is an engagement with online communities to generate exposure, opportunity and sales. The number-one advantage is generating exposure for the business, followed by increasing traffic and building new business partnerships  In the context of Internet marketing, social media refers to a collective group of web properties whose content is primarily published by users, not direct employees of the property (e.g. the vast majority of video on YouTube is published by non-YouTube employees).

Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites.

Social media marketing has two important aspects:

(1) Adding links to services such as Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us so that their pages can be easily 'saved and submitted' to and for these services.

(2) Building ways that fans of a brand or company can promote it themselves in multiple online social media venues.

Some social media marketers offer to write content (such as white papers) that are unique and newsworthy. This content can then be marketed by popularizing it or even by creating a “viral” video on YouTube and other video sites, including getting involved in blogs, forums, and niche communities. Others in the social media world consider this form of social media marketing Astroturfing or "fake grass roots".