Tuesday, December 11, 2007

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social Media Marketing or the SMM is the meeting ground for social media sites and certain internet marketing goals. Each business may have a different motive or priority while implementing SMM. Hence, a goal cannot be generalized; it will differ for every organization with an online presence.In most cases an SMM is implemented to promote a service or product, however, it can also do wonders if it is successfully implemented to increase brand awareness and overall visibility on the internet. Both retaining and enhancing an organizations reputation can be done through SMM.

In most cases, online communities do not accept ancient selling techniques, such as too much advertisement or orthodox selling techniques, in such a case, an SMM may have to be executed, skillfully and under intense observation.
You must spend time in analyzing your target audience, and also ensure that your SMM campaign is successfully reaching the intended audience. Ensuring that you have an appealing message is also essential when it comes to building an SMM campaign for a few select communities or service buyers. Convincing information sent through a simple, though a heavy exposure medium such as an entertainment network is a simple way to guarantee success in your SMM campaign.
Other marketing techniques which are related to SMM:
There are various other marketing techniques which are very closely related to SMM, namely SEO or Search Engine Optimization, WoM or the Word of Mouth marketing phenomenon, SEM or Search Engine Marketing, and SMO or Social Media Optimization. One such effective marketing technique is called Viral Marketing. Viral Marketing or simply VM is a promotional concept wherein people voluntarily add to the campaign by spreading your message, as they themselves approve of your service or product. Viral marketing has been compared to Human and Computer Viruses which have an extensive reach and a rapid growth action; this is also where the technique gets its name from.
Social media sites and the origination of SMO:
A social media web site can be defined as a common ground, where individuals and experts gather to share their views, perspectives and opinions. Social media has adapted various mediums like images, audio, video, and textual mediums.Social media sites provide a huge variety of subjects, topics, and objective discussions to choose from. The idea of implementing SMO is to make the required changes to a website so it is easier to link to, in turn making it more visible in the social media website searches. In the late 90’s and Indian named Rohit Bhargava coined a term called SMO. He also enlisted five important techniques which are still considered to be important SMO guidelines.
Five point guideline to successfully implement SMM:
1- Improve the ability of your website, so that it can be linked to easily
2- Improvise you website in a manner, so as to promote the idea being bookmarked
3- Incoming links are special, treat these links with respect by providing a dedicated space for them
4- Ensure your content is precise, it should be informative and appealing, this will increase your transportability and pave the road for your content to be passed along through various sites and communities
5- Encourage Information supplied by a third party, using simple platforms which enable re-usability. Common platforms that reinforce re-usability would include the likes of RSS and other common Web Feeds.
There have been a number of additions that have been made to the above mentioned five points, namely factors like creating original content to as to not disappoint users who may land on your site, staying fresh to keep up activity and retain interest in your site visitors, use precaution while selecting a SMO technique, engage in providing simple but useful resources to your visitors, increase the possibility of your users sharing ideas by providing the required space and increasing comfort levels, analyze and then decide who your target audience should be, do some research and develop you won unique SMO strategies, etc.
Available Social media sites:
There are many social media sites available on the internet today. Some of these sites are also built to target certain, products, industries, or services.Sites and their niches, which satisfy the above mentioned mantras of good SMM:
Digg:
Digg is a content sharing website, where the content is supplied by Digg users and read by Digg’s community members, which brings a social or public aspect to it. Digg is a perfect example of the fourth point mentioned above. Digg ensures that a submitted article gets the right kind of exposure it deserves, it is perfectly understandable that the article may then get attention based on its quality.A bookmark/rating option called ‘Digg it’ is provided by the website; the option lets you account acknowledgements and as a result, shows the popularity.
Flickr:
An online photo managing and sharing website. Flickr, was probably one of the first sites to have started a photograph sharing environment.
Flickr’s release triggered an entire wave of photograph managing and sharing websites across the wide span of the internet.
This is a user based website, where all additions are made by members only.
There are a lot of social media websites like, looking at a few, there is a website called youtube.com where you can upload your videos, del.icio.us which is a social bookmarking website, which let’s you store your bookmarks online, this helps you access your bookmarked sites from anywhere around the world. Other information based websites would include the Wikihow, which is probably one of the biggest ‘How to’ websites on the internet, the information and content on this website is provided by it’s users, and there’s Technorati, which helps in organizing bloggers and blogs, Technorati also provides a special option to it’s users, it allows you to see who has linked to your blog.
Is it worth spending so much time of Social Media Marketing?
The answer is yes! Your survival kit for the internet has just one tool, that one tool is the visibility of your website. Advertising for your website will not give you the kind of exposure social media marketing and SEO can.Tapping into this useful channel is very important if you wish to build a well known internet identity.
Will Social Media Marketing Improve my search engine rankings?
The answer once again would be yes. SMM increase accessibility to your website. Interlacing of relevant websites is bound to bring in more visitors.Linking to relevant websites or higher ranked pages will not only increase the visitors but also improve the quality of visitors that visit your website. After all, SMM is a marketing method and successful implementation will increase your rank dramatically.
Plan your SMM strategy, when planned perfectly SMM will overwhelmingly increase your visibility and exposure on the internet.

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