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Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing (AKA Web 2.0) is a term that describes use of social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis or any other online collaborative media for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service. Social networking is one of the hottest things going at the moment, and these websites are getting more popular every day as ecommerce entrepreneurs discover how tremendously effective it is. Whether you want to sell your products, publish the business updates, press releases, social media marketing is the powerful method that will earn you profits on the long run. This type of marketing can also help you increase activity around these top goals: Website traffic and user behavior (external and internal tracking), conversion and sales tracking, page views, ad exposure, growing brand awareness (a softer value - takes longer to build), creating a positive brand association and keeping it there (see also reputation management), business development, and a broader customer reach.
Social media marketing (SMM) on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon and Digg has exploded in the past year. Savvy marketers recognize this trend and try to use this to their advantage. SMM is characterized by communities that allow users to do many or all of the following:
1. Create profiles/accounts
2. Grow a network of colleagues/friends
3. Collaborate with other community members
4. Submit content
5. Vote on content
6. Tag content and
7. Comment on content
Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Social Media Optimization (SMO) are two new phrases that popped up last year to define marketing through social media and social networking sites. Social media marketing has three important aspects: A) Creating buzz or newsworthy events B). Videos and C) Tweets, or blog entries that attract attention, and become viral in nature.
SMM is a great addition to any traditional SEO work that you do, but it's not a substitute. Social media marketing can generate leads at almost no cost, can help your site get better rankings on search engines, and can help you get the word out about your company. Social media marketing is a great way to build long term sustainable, natural social media traffic and search engine rankings. This type of marketing can be effective if executed well because it is an easy way to access the real audience. On the other hand, a badly designed social marketing campaign can potentially backfire on the person or organization that created it. So, before you begin any kind of social media marketing, it might be a good idea to set up an account and jump into a conversation or community. If you already have an account on one site, maybe look at signing up on other sites.
Social media marketing is still marketing, and still basically PPC, but the advantages are numerous. For example, the extent of the marketing campaigns include social media advertising, but could also encompass product development, trend monitoring, reducing churn, benchmarking and so on.
Also, SMM can be used as a part of a two stage process: first, to identify certain patterns in data, secondly to verify those observations by specific social media campaigns which also seek permission from the customers.
When you compare the spending on social media marketing from August 2009 to February 2010, overall there's an increase of 60% in the budgets and 66 percent of marketers worldwide now expect to invest in social media marketing this year. If anything, for social media marketing to succeed requires a constant effort and allocation of resources, both in time and money.
In summary, social media marketing offers advantages over traditional marketing such as little or no cost, getting to know the “real” audience, drive more traffic to your web site, and can actually be fun in the process! However - think your campaign through before implementing or it could backfire and leave you flapping in the breeze. There’s nothing worse than a failed marketing campaign on a “social” network site. It could just mean the kiss of death for your trouble!
Dominate the Web 2.0 Market:
You Do Not Have to Spend a Dime Marketing. While it does take money to make money, you do not have to spend money on marketing
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