By : Admin

Social Media Marketing is a method of promoting a brand. The brand could be you, your product, services or your company! It involves making your presence known, strategically, across social media networks where each category has a different and intricate method for effective promotion. These various social media networks may be:

• Digg: Digg is all about user powered content.
• Reddit: Reddit is a source for what’s new and popular online.
• StumbleUpon: StumbleUpon learns what you like and makes better recommendations.
• MySpace: MySpace offers the widest variety of tools and social networking capabilities.

Social Media Marketing drives brand awareness which transforms into sales, later.

Social Media is not designed to immediately provide business but instead it provides the visibility to your brand (product/service), that it needs to ultimately convert the visitors into customers/buyers. Having a commercial presence on various social media networks provides great content and widget which serves to raise the awareness of your brand so that users remember your service for later. It provides you with a platform to share the benefits of your brand.

Social Media Marketing can be organized into the following categories:

Social Networking Sites: these sites allow you to create a powerfully diverse and engaging web presence complete with photos, articles, and bookmarks. E.g. MySpace.

Business Networking Sites: These sites are devoted to networking business people and provide direct access to upper level management / executives for sales people and for those looking to create industry connections. E.g. Jigsaw.

Social Bookmarking Sites: provides collection and organization of the sites that you choose to bookmark and allow you to share them with other others. E.g. Del.icio.us.

Content Voting Sites: these sites are used by people to vote for any content they find useful online through which the visibility of the content gains momentum. E.g. Digg.

News Sharing Sites: These sites serve as private news hubs where information is collected from blogs or other syndicated content that the user has decided to be kept up to date on. E.g. Technorati.

Collaborative Directories: These directories are compiled with recommended sites or content maintained by online volunteers e.g. Wikipedia.

Video Sharing Sites: These sites allow video sharing as video sharing is one of the foremost methods of social marketing. E.g. Youtube

Photo Sharing: These sites stand out as serious performers in this socially-driven field of photo sharing. E.g. Flickr.

With the explosion of social media in so many different forms, one might get perplexed so as to what is the right time to consider Social Media Marketing. It really depends on knowing your audience and knowing if your website is ready for the possibility of huge traffic coming from it. Other factors that worth consideration are: usage of any PPC campaign and optimization of the site.

Social Media Marketing is complicated for two reasons: no one has created a structure to work from, and there’s so much overlap in functionality of different sites, that it can be quite confusing. Moreover, there’s one general rule for using these sites as marketing tools and that is don’t spam the system.

To conclude, Social media is an art. There is no hard or fast rule as such, what all it requires is you to have an in-depth knowledge of your audience and what your web site can handle.

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