Social Media Marketing And Advertising

Social media marketing is a popular term used to describe the use of online social

networking sites (such as, for example, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr etc), online communities and discussion boards, blogs and other collaborative Internet forums for marketing, sales promotion, public relations and customer service etc. Businesses, whether online or traditional, are increasingly realizing that promoting their website and business through social marketing channels is a powerful strategy that gets them links, attention and, most importantly, a massive amount of quality traffic at a low cost.

Social media advertising can be an effective low-cost adjunct to conventional website promotion strategies such as link exchanges, search advertising or the purchase of banner and editorial ads on relevant sites; providing natural or spontaneous links to large groups of people (without the suspicious commercial overtones of paid advertising!). It is a low-cost/high-return strategy, which many a time may involve only the cost of your time and that of hiring a freelance programmer or designer as opposed to spending large amounts on regular online advertising methods.

Social marketing is usually community-specific and allows you to target a particular set of people with common interests (which would normally support your marketing objectives) without interfering with other methods of getting traffic to your website. Very importantly, social media networks, by allowing user participation and one-to-one interactions (as opposed to sending conventional promotional messages) helps to build consumer confidence and trust, one of the most important ingredients for any successful online marketing programme. Such confidence and trust also allows online marketers to utilize viral marketing techniques where their marketing messages are replicated through user-to-user contacts!

An effective social media marketing strategy, apart from getting people to your site, has other important secondary benefits. For instance, many search engines give importance to the number of incoming links a website has, while ranking it; and the large number of spontaneous links from websites of social networking members helps to improve your rankings. This is particularly important for new websites which may find it difficult initially to gain links through conventional means.

An interesting development in the internet marketing space related to social media marketing is that many sites include features where companies can create profiles (Facebook, for instance, allows companies to create 'pages') where users can become 'fans' of the company; its products; services etc. As more and more businesses, particularly retailers, turn to the Internet and social media marketing to bolster waning sales in the face of a global economic downturn, social media sites may likely become the next major retail destination. A recent 2009 survey has indicated that companies in the USA are currently spending close to 3.5% of their marketing budgets on social media marketing and this is likely to increase to around 13.7% within five years.

One of the biggest advantages of social media marketing (unlike other online strategies like search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising etc) is that it is easy to implement; something everyone can do with some effort and knowledge!

by: James Copper

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