Social Media Marketing: Are You in this Game of Business Promotion?

Social media marketing is a pack of online marketing techniques that uses the power of social media to promote your online business. This efficient and effective strategy will help you establish links and drive in heavy web traffic to your website. In other words, social media marketing lays the foundation of strong brand image by helping you market your products and services on varied online social media venues.

‘Social Media Marketing’ or Web2.0 Marketing that gained entry into the business world(web)  a few years back has made the use of web even more popular among the marketers. It is a marketing method in which the promoters of a brand are not necessarily the employee of the company. Social media actually helps to get products or services endorsed by the users or the target audience.

Social Media: Still to be tapped lot more!

Social media marketing has two important aspects. The first, Social Media Optimization, which refers to on-page strategies through which a webmaster can improve a website for the age of social media. Such optimization includes adding links to services such as Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us so that their pages can be easily saved and submitted.

Second is having an account with these social networking websites and consistently participate in the various activities talking place at these sites.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Web 2.0 is an application that enables community members to talk, share, participate and bookmark online thereby encouraging open discussions, creating blogs, posting articles and videos on YouTube, voting, knowledge sharing and feedbacks.

Web 2.0 marketing: Cost-effective promotion tool

With Web 2.0 marketing, you no longer depend solely on costly electronic or print media for setting a stage for powerful marketing campaign to entice a large number of people. Using Web 2.0, now even the average users can learn the marketing strategies and get real business prospects thereby opening multiple revenue channels for themselves.

Web 2.0 marketing has given rise to Social Media Marketing. It is a collection of online techniques that facilitates advertising or promotion through socializing. Unlike conventional media which promotes unidirectional broadcast, social media marketing is bidirectional and promotes effective communication between you and your prospects.

To put it in simple words, social media marketing weaves your content effectively into the social web by helping you connect with your target audience as friends and communicate with them in real time so that you can respond to them accordingly. In fact, it is a potential method that will give your business triumphant online presence and make your website reap great profits over a period of time.

Why consider Social Media Marketing?

• It creates online buzz for your brand: It sets a viral effect leading to the word-of-mouth popularity of your product or services by the user itself.
• It increases brand visibility: Very soon you can make your brands popular among your target audience because of the viral effect created through social networking sites. These viral processes can be word of mouth or may be in the form of audio-video clips, Flash games, ebooks, softwares, images etc.
• It helps in building credibility: When the users of a product are recommending the same, it adds credibility as there is no marketing of self interest underlying in doing so. It is mere brand loyalty in the mind that prompts users to spread the brand message.
• It is cost effective: This method of marketing on web till now is considered as one of the most cost-effective method of marketing as you can easily spread your message for very low cost. Most of the social networking websites allow you to freely create your account and start posting your messages.
• It enables focused marketing: The messages you are spreading for your brand can be highly controlled, as you can post messages for particular community. For example, if you are looking to promote a website that sells book, you can easily find 100s of book communities and use these communities to spread your brand message.
• It boosts website traffic: Since a large number of people hang around these social networking sites, the chances of your products getting exposed to this traffic are also very high. Social Media Optimization can significantly boost your website traffic overnight.
• It lends share and gain marketing insights: It helps you consistently evolve as an intelligent marketer. You learn from the efforts by other SMO professionals, when you interact online, to promote a product. You experiment with some of the good methods for your product and it helps you evolve consistently. You position your product effectively without paying exorbitant fees to marketing consultants.

With this information, you are all set to take a plunge into the world of social media marketing. However owing to the pressure of numerous business tasks to handle, you may find yourself stuck up with the difficulty of developing social media friendly website. But now you can easily find good freelance web developers, with sound knowledge of SMO on different freelance websites.