Does Content Live in a Silo? Hell NO!

The whole marketing industry is going crazy behind Content Marketing these days. But what actually content marketing is? Does it make sense to say that it’s a strategy to use content for great marketing results. But that’s not what it is.

Content does NOT live in silo. It only fetches results for businesses when used in combination with other marketing channels and innovative marketing practices. It’s one of the planets of the vast inbound marketing solar system. Confused? Read further.

Content can fall flat on its face (or be ineffective)  if NOT used with:

SEO – Many marketers think content marketing is all about creating more content and the easiest way to do that is through regular blogging. However even great content can deliver no value, if it goes unnoticed or if your target audiences are not able to find it. SEO is a surefire way to ensure that your remarkable content gets found and read by the right set of people i.e., your target audiences. Marketers should ensure that the helpful content that they create must be optimized well for keywords used by their target audiences to locate certain products or services on search engines. That’s how content attracts organic traffic.

Social Media – With social media euphoria gripping humans across all age groups, geographies and business sectors, almost every brand wants to tap this huge real estate and engage with their target audiences across varied social media channels. For enhanced content reach and visibility, it needs to be distributed imperatively across relevant social media sites (only those where your target market hangs out frequently). Popular social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. are the online avenues, where readers love to share the infotaining content that you create. Hence as a smart marketer, make it easy for them to do so by integrating social media sharing buttons in each content piece that you push out on the Web. Not only does it increase your content’s reach or effectiveness, but can also help you engage with your target audiences easily and help them address their challenges with your useful content. If your content succeeds in solving their challenges/pain points, no wonder these readers can also become your brand evangelists. So keep feeding them with awesome content on their most favorite online destinations!

Email marketing – Some businesses see email marketing as the most powerful tool in their marketing arsenal to connect with their contact database. Email can really help your content get out there and grab many more eyeballs. Without email marketing, your content’s reach is constrained drastically and can make all your content creation efforts go waste.

It’s damn simple. Content forms the beating heart of your inbound marketing strategy but ONLY when it’s used along with other channels (a few of them listed above!). Don’t sandbox your content. Give it wings and let it soar high and wide to cover the complete horizon of your target audiences.

 

 

 

Top Tips for Effective Content Curation

Flurry of excitement about content curation in the online industry. Many B2B and B2C companies have queued up for spreading their reach through this digital channel. Only a few ones are able to hit the nail?

If you wish to play long innings on the online marketing landscape, you need to brush off your old marketing concepts. Throw away the thought that you’d publish some content on the Web, and there’d be a natural in-flow of trackbacks, social shares, inbound links, page views and all of that. Don’t give that amazed look if you observe some silent returns on your publishing exercise.

Content Curation: Spread your Story Naturally

For a swashbuckling digital marketing reach, remember the golden rule – Create fresh, remarkable and relevant content. With all social media marketing platforms at your disposal, it’s all the more an easy task now, provided you know the way to do it right.

Here are some tips for you that can help you cut through the entire hullabaloo and make sure your content spreads naturally and effectively on the World Wide Web.

Avoid being overly experimental.

What’s that? Don’t tax yourself by fiddling too much with the approach every time you pen down your content. Analyze your past content trends and figure out some sweet content spots. Evaluate which types of content have fetched you the maximum number of likes, shares, comments and links. Now go for some serious, smart work. Try to replicate this success and create a fresh editorial calendar based on content analytics.

Ignite emotions. Shock your people (I mean your target audiences). Shoot content that delights, frightens or even annoys them. Do you know what content goes viral? That ignites strong emotional reactions in your readers. Why? It kindles some key emotions like sadness, happiness, wrath or even disgust in them. This steers social sharing and hence increases reach of your content on the Web. So, now is the time for you to consider creating some emotion-evoking content.

Hammer a captivating headline. Though a bit startling, social media referrals generate the most traffic for a website now. It’s the new SEO on board. The more is the social sharing of your content, more is the opportunity generated for you to get found online. How can you arrest the attention of your readers in the first place? An engaging headline would do the magic and lure your readers to click and spread your content in their networks. Now, what constitutes a good headline? A title that’s unique, relevant, thought-provoking, and contains some surprise value for your readers.

Love social media. In this inbound marketing age, you can’t overlook social media platforms and form a content strategy, devoid of these key elements. Marry your content with social media. Do remember to embellish your content with multi-media ingredients as these are rewarded greatly on such platforms in the form of shares and engagement.

Content Curation: Get your Story the potent SEO juice

Turn your blog into a social media marketing machine. Use your blog’s real estate to showcase your content and ask for feedback from your readers, which will eventually help you refine your product further. A fine-tuned product, tailored to target audiences’ expectations, has multiplied scope of recommendations and henceforth, virality.  Don’t forget to incorporate social media sharing and blog subscription widgets on to your blog. Publish relevant and engaging posts and see the charm of social media sharing.

So let your target audience give a rousing reception to your content on the Web. Get started with spreading your great content naturally.

Are You a Victim to Common Blogging Mistakes?

Have you been nursing the silent ambition of donning the hat of a successful blogger?  Whoa. To position yourself in the blogging space, it’s important to know the golden tips to blogging. Think you’re done? Oh boy!  Knowing the tricks to ward off the danger of falling victim to most common blogging bloopers is even more important.

I wore the blogging jacket a few years ago. Today after half a decade, I make a shameless confession that I committed some big blogging mistakes. Fortunately, some real accomplished gentlemen, rather some paragons of generosity, flocked to my rescue and handed over those much needed blogging band-aids to me on time. Again, a big ‘Thank you’ to Mr. Pawan Aggarwal, my mentor in Online Blogging!

Don’t be guilty, if you are prone to blogging mistakes. There’s a whole blogging first-aid kit available, full of easy fixes. Here are a few tips. Follow them. Go, cross swords with millions of bloggers out there and rule the roost.

So, you’re your company’s blogger. All eyes are riveted on you that you’ll swirl your magic blogging wand. More website traffic, more leads in-flow, more conversions down the sales funnel. Whoops. Nothing happening? Are you doing one of these?

Are you publishing the blog on a free domain, different from your company’s main website? Eeek…Serious damning move! It hurts your search engine optimization and branding efforts. Search engines are hungry for fresh content. Every blog that your write creates a fresh web page for search spiders to crawl and index, and make get you the most coveted space on search engine results. So if you run a blog on a separate domain, then you’re actually depriving your corporate website of the SEO juice that you squeeze from your blog.

Quick fix: Bring your blog home. Integrate it with your corporate website, either on a subdomain or in the website’s folder. And, feed your website with the fresh SEO juice of your blog.

Are you lost in the humdrums of other inbound marketing initiatives and publishing your blogs infrequently? Trust me on this one – Frequency does matter! If you’re inconsistent in your blogging spree, you’re not moving a needle.

Easy Fix: Online blogging demands boatloads of resources, time and commitment. Deep research throws light on the fact that businesses that blog frequently benefit most in terms of generating leads. So here’s one trick pony to help you generate more traffic and leads – Upkeep your blog with utmost dedication. Publish frequently and consistently. Churn out as much fresh content as possible through your blogs. Charm your target audience with thought-provoking and unique blogs. More traffic, more leads, more sales!

Boy, you can’t afford to miss out on the next one!

Blogging Mistakes: Are you a victim or victor?

Are you blowing the trumpet about your product all the time? A big turn off for your readers! Company bloggers get deterred by criticism too often (even I used to be). Deadly targets, time running out, performance appraisals nearing. And next, you start vomiting out too much product-centric content on your blog in an attempt to spread maximum possible awareness about your brand in the market and resultant heavy web traffic and leads. Seriously, no thought leadership.

Quick fix:Remember, your target audience is hungry for relevant and remarkable content. If there exists a yawning gap between the desired content and fed content, then you will fail to accomplish your avowed blogging goals. Modify your editorial calendar and slate varied content topics to be published on the chosen days. Your readers wish to see you as a thought leader and  you keep feeding them with only your product-focused content. Abandon the blinkered approach of bragging about your product. This is a recipe to disaster. There should be no rumbles of discontentment for content in your readers. Seduce them with though-provoking content and drive them crazy until they feel hungry for your content.Write about your relevant industry’s best practices, trends, statistics, general topics of interest to your readers. Focus on educational content, non-product focused case studies. And lots more!

Are you only writing and not promoting your blog? Shhhhhhhhh..approach. You publish but don’t promote your content. By doing this, you’re actually deflating your readership and subscriber base. Social networks are the real home of your content.  If you do not curate or publish your content on social media sites, you are not letting your content shake hands with the other family members i.e., millions of registered users there. If they do not come to know about the existence of your content on the web, you’re robbing your blog of its potential.

Easy fix:Create your presence on major social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest etc. Build your community there. Expand your reach. Finally, share your blog with them and make this social media sharing exercise an easy one. Convert your fans into powerful evangelists of your brand on these sites.

Are you overlooking your blog metrics? Don’t care to see if your blogging effort is paying you at all? Well, you’re ignoring some real valuable insights then. How are you going to convince your conniving BOSS about your blogging success? Apart from playing a key role in determining the next hike in the salary of a company blogger, blog analytics do matter when it comes to analyzing the topics that work and filtering them from the ones that don’t. More so, these insights help you to chalk out an effective blog content road map for the next quarter.

Quick fix: Keep a close watch on the performance of your blog. Monitor and measure the success of your blogging effort across different parameters. Key insights such as number of subscribers and comments, popular keywords, page views, social media shares, number of trackbacks and inbound links, number of leads tickling down the sales funnel and finally conversions – all these metrics do create waves.

Overfed with blogging mistakes and fixes? Well, it’s time for this blabbering tongue to stop. Hope these tips would help you sharpen your blogging razor and scale your effort to new heights of effectiveness.

Happy Blogging!!!

Censoring User Content on Social Networking Websites: Is It Justified?

Censor on social networking sites. What! Did you get startled on hearing this bit like me? Then I observed that I’m not the only one. This news piece has invoked almost all Indian users on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. How can I air such a prediction? Well, it’s the huge scores of status updates, tweets, blogs links etc. that are a mirror of general disgust expressed by millions of social media users to such an imprudent suggestion from an honorable minister of the Government of India.

Censoring User Content on Social Networking Websites

In fact, this kindles a thought in me. How far can this government go on committing blunders? Overlooking 2G scam, CWG scam, maddening price rise, sabotaging Ramdev’s protest and exercising all tyrannical methods to curb the voice, followed by putting down Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement and then attacks on Team Anna’s members..And the list continues.

Now, the biggest blunder of coming up with the daffy idea of censoring user content on social networking websites. Rather, sealing our lips or smashing our fundamental right of expression. I’m surprised that how could the so-called Gandhian minister, who at even the slightest of incitement starts blabbering the articles and clauses of our Constitution, forget to shuffle the page of ‘Fundamental Rights’ while he was cramming each page of Constitution with a magnifying glass in his hand.

Do some of our politicians plan to bereave us of our voice after food & electricity?

While this suggestion has been shunned from the scratch by Big Daddies (like Google, Facebook) on the web landscape, it has staged a big interrogation mark on the intelligence set up of the government leading the nation. It’s sick that on one hand, we shout about being the largest democratic nation of the world and then one of the most reputed ministers tables his insane idea  and whim of choking our necks so that we can’t voice our opinions in public on these  sites.

To add to this, he’s beating the drums hard that machine/technology-driven screening of user content be replaced with manual monitoring of pages for reproachful, provocative or derogatory content. I guess the so-called minister, who is in the habit of commenting on all technological innovations and discoveries and bask in the glory of possessing the most tech-savvy brain among all, who walk into the Parliament does not have an account on Facebook. Or even if he has, might not be able to be active there by virtue of his busy schedule. Because if he was really aware of the humongous user base of Facebook in India, he would not have voiced this silly suggestion.

Self-regulation: A preaching from many

The latest news that I saw this morning that Google has slammed the idea by commenting that they’re on a rigorous spree of screening the content. So, any expression that abides by the law won’t be removed just because it’s inflammatory. More so, it’s vague to decide what is or is not profane or derogatory.

It’s great to see such tepid response from all segments – social networking sites, business communities, individual users – to an inane idea of censoring user content on social networking websites.

Social Media ROI? A Billion Dollar Question!

Almost every brand, every marketer has joined the social media wave today. Each of them seems to be in a desperate spree to peep into the secret social media ROI closet of competitors.

When the year commenced, a great pie of marketing honchos had predicted that the year 2011 will be commemorated as the year of some real hard Social Media ROIs. But has this prediction come out true? Are we now well versed with handling the barometric performance of our social media endeavors? Or, did we harbor an illusion?

Is Social Media ROI Measurable?

I’m not taking potshots at the Goliaths of the industry but being a social media marketing professional myself, I’m of the opinion that this prediction has been on the wane. Indeed, it’s a big mystery. Fluctuating social media trends further compound the situation.

I still don’t see any standard tool that can effectively lay out the metrics to estimate exact or even near social media ROIs. But we, as marketers, have to justify our social media initiatives.  How do we do that? There’s no one standard formula but still we can try to touch the concept of social media ROI and scratch it a bit.

Do you identify Facebook or Twitter as ‘Mecca of Social Media’? Let me put it like this. Is it your ultimate goal on the Web? If yes, then my dear friends it’s a wake-up call. You’ve to start looking upon social media as a vehicle, an intermediary link between your business objectives and ROIs. But you need to constantly ride this bandwagon. And not just sit and think of enjoying the ride. In simple words, you need to be consistent on social media to keep your target audiences glued to your brands since social media users are brand hungry. Make a sincere attempt to be friends with ‘FRANDS’ (friends, who are hungry for brands).

I recently came across a very interesting article ‘The value of a Facebook fan’. I read it thoroughly but still am not convinced that it’s actually possible to measure the potential of a social media fan or social media ROI for that matter.

Though measuring the conversion or rather success rate of traditional marketing initiatives is relatively easier, but a thoughtful approach can be taken for social media ROI too and not make it look like a Herculean task. We can streamline social media task chart and fragment it into specific activities, and then look for calculating the ROIs for each of them.

Is it just the revenue that matters? Or social engagement?

Another treasure trove that we can dig out of social media is the conversation streams generated. We can use these user-generated content streams to reap their optimum use for each of the departments and organization as a whole. Don’t rant more about statistics, though you may utilize the same for devising your future strategy.

It’s time to flaunt your intelligence by using social media in a way that matches best to your ultimate business goals., and not just being another sheep in the pastures (of social media). Optimize your social media strategy for each of the departments, and then measure its success based on specific performance metrics. I think social media success measurement should not be filtered from the way we measure the success of offline marketing initiatives.

Though I’ve jotted down my thoughts about social media ROIs here, it’s your turn to be vocal about your views on social media ROIs.

Look forward to seeing your share your thoughts in the comment box below.

New Ailment Diagnosed: Facebook Addiction Disorder (FAD)..Are you suffering?

Habits are first cobwebs, then cables. And, Facebook plays off this trend.

Suffering from FAD?

Your Inbox has been a repeated recipient of registration emails, for close to half a decade now, from new social media websites emerging everyday on the Web. In fact, the World Wide Web is now mushroomed with these websites, ready to engulf you under the veil of consumption of information in the social media space.

It's high time you must confront your Facebook addiction!

Most of us fell victim to these temptations initially, and instantly prodded our keyboards to have our smiling faces engraved on the user pages of these websites. A competition began. A competition that blinded us—to add more and more friends. The bigger the social circle, the more is the social prestige! It became the style mantra. We didn’t realize when we got entangled in the mesh of social media. Now, can you beat this one? One out of eight couples that got married in 2010 in U.S. met through social media.

Facebook surfaced, and within a span of two years almost ate into Orkut and MySpace like a moth. It has become our ‘Best Friend’, accompanying us anytime, anywhere. Most of you would agree with me on this if I say that Facebook is indeed much better than most of ‘our passive’ acquaintances in our Facebook circle added as ‘Friends’. 😉 😉

But do you realize that in the recent past, you’ve started loving Facebook more than it’s needed. It’s imperative to screen your personality right at this juncture to find out if you’ve fallen an easy prey to this parasite.

• Do you check your Facebook account even before you go for your daily ablutions?
• Is it now your habit to prod your mobile phone when not in front of your PC or laptop to log on to Facebook and check the news feed?
• Is logging on there multiple times a day now a routine?
• Are you now in the practice of sharing the minutest details of your personal or professional life on Facebook?
• Do you talk to or express your love for your siblings through Facebook wall, comments, etc. even when you are at an arm’s length from each other?
• Do you feel the repeated urge of knowing about your Facebook status, comments, updates etc. when you’re offline?
• Do you have 6, 589 friends in your friend list? Do you feel you’re going into depression if you forget to update ‘good night’ status on your Facebook wall?

FAD: A cost for loving digital media too passionately

Dear friends, these are the symptoms of your uncontrolled activities on Facebook, and with a heavy heart I declare this as ‘Facebook Mania’. Better to call it ‘Facebook Addiction Disorder’ (FAD), a mainstream medical disorder as declared by psychologists.

Let me pull your attention to some mind-tickling statistics of Facebook addiction.

As per one of the probes conducted, it has been predicted that over 350 million Facebook users worldwide have admitted to be suffering from this addiction. What alarming numbers of this malady!

Some findings suggest that over 48% Facebook users check or update their Facebook status before they hit the bed. Over 21% of women aged 18-34 years check Facebook in the middle of the night. More than 50% users are fine in being friends with absolute strangers on Facebook.Over 19% of users below 25 years of age feel restless if they’re not able to check their accounts for more than a couple of hours. More than 61% users compulsorily check their accounts once a day.  Over 23% iPhone users largely get their morning news from Facebook.

Startled? Me, too!

An addiction that’s on the rise, globally. And, it calls for an immediate fix.

FAD: Is it 'Real' or simply a fad?

You can rise from the corpse of FAD only when you’re willing to accept that you’re a victim of this ailment, and that you need to save yourself from the pangs of it. Once your heart and head give you a ‘Green Signal’ unanimously, make a headway advance in your de-addiction spree. The sooner, the better!

I’d recommend that you spend some more time with your kith and kins; stay away from your PC whenever you feel an urge to access your Facebook account; give up the peer pressure of Facebook-ing. And, you’ll find in some time that you have nibbled the mesh of Facebook addiction yourself, and succeeded in setting yourself free.

Free again, to enjoy the beauties of nature and life.

War of Corporate Gullivers—Google Vs. Facebook #1

Can you afford to miss this front?

The two Industry social media titans are at war. Google had been ruling the Web seamlessly until Facebook stepped in. Now, they are known competitors; one trying endlessly to outshine the other. The tech-driven social war is now fully on!

The social sharing war is fully on.

The users, you and me, are warming up for a classic feud between these two Internet giants. If Google entered the group-buying domain with Google Offers, Facebook lagged no behind and entered the scenario with its Facebook Deals.

The epic battle does not stop here.

To shake the strongly anchored roots of Facebook in the social networking arena, Google launched its social networking site Google Plus in June, signing up more than 10 million users in the first two weeks. It’s interesting and surprising to note that Facebook took 852 days to get these many registered users. This seems like a real challenge to the gigantic vantage position of Facebook in the social networking space, I guess.

It's too early to say who will win this battle.

Google has already shown its prowess in the first 16 days to Facebook with such head huge start in the social networking arena. Facebook seems to be a bit startled and has even admitted to recruiting a renowned PR agency to circulate anti-Google stories in the media and Web.

In my opinion, Facebook has shown sheer immaturity in handling this neck-to neck competition. May be its executives are inefficient to handle such fierce social rivalry. This raises many questions about the competence and business maturity of the Facebook top management league. May be it’s growing too fast to be handled by it.

So is Facebook going to lose out this battle to Google? May be the comparative analysis of the features that I do later in this post helps you get a better view of the ongoing battle.

Competitive explosion of sign-ups & engagement

So what has made Google Plus win so many eye balls so soon? Its feature—Circles. You can use this feature to segregate your friends into different groups like family, friends, acquaintances etc. Now what’s the added advantage here? The in-built security benefit that facilitates you to share your posts selectively. Whereas on Facebook, you’re supposed to form a group and club all your friends together with same interests.

Now let’s talk about ‘Commenting’ on the two platforms. While on Facebook, you need to edit your Privacy settings to stop some of your friends from commenting on your posts, you’ve a smoother experience on Google Plus. Here, you can disable commenting for a specific post directly from your Stream. More so if you disable commenting on Facebook, it takes place for all your posts, whereas on Google Plus, you can do it for a specific post that you want.

Rapid evolution of Google+ has put a bee in Facebook bonnet.

Google Plus Sparks is definitely a feature that places Google above Facebook. It’s a unique way to stay abreast of all the latest information for the chosen topic. Facebook, however, is devoid of any such feature.

You may find me biased towards Google here but I find Facebook somewhat regulated by its incumbent technology approach, whereas Google is relatively more flexible in aligning its technology resources to the newer and unexplored zones.

This is my first post in the series of Google—Facebook war. I’m yet to say a lot more on this topic. So stay tuned for the post. II of the series.

Are You a Slave to Web? It’s Time to Free Yourself from Addiction!

Web Addiction: A Disorder on the Rise

It’s different. Enough of stories about drug or alcohol addiction. It’s a new entrant in our lives, a new form of addiction that has engulfed many of us. It’s Web Addiction. Are you a victim too?

Though you may think that the blogger (that’s me!) is herself a web addict since she gives you a diet of a blog every day, even two sometimes, why is she preaching about web addiction? Well to be candid, I’m not a web junkie. It’s my passion to write, and my mind is always flooded with blog ideas, which trigger me to pen down my thoughts regularly. Also, it’s my means of livelihood. So, I really can’t free myself from the habit of being online every day.

But I can handhold you if you wish to find out if you have been swallowed by the online world or not. There’s a thin line between being web-savvy and web addict. Which one are you? To find an answer to this, there is, however, a pre-requisite. And that is, you need to dig out deeper into your web habits with an open mind and readiness to accept the results, even if they’re not in your favor.

If your answer is ‘YES’, then let’s take a step further.

Web Addiction: Are You @ Risk?

Here are a few questions as I shoot them at you, you need to answer each one in plain Yes/No. Be honest here!

• Is your significant other complaining about you getting emotionally distant with each passing day?
• Are you so consumed with the online world that you’re unknowingly evading your prime responsibilities in your personal life?
• Apart from work & other professional commitments, do you spend more than 3-4 hours on web even when at home?
• Do you check these websites as soon as you log on to your computers—Facebook/Twitter/Gmail/YouTube?
• Do you check these websites multiple times a day?
• Do you leave your work to check the status update of your friend(s) as soon as you get the alert in your Inbox?
• Do you hit the ‘Refresh button’ many a times when online?
• Do you access web many times on your smartphones when not able to check the same on computers?

If your answer is ‘Yes’ for most of these questions, my dear friend I regret to inform you that you’re a Web Addict. Indeed, you are a slave to Web. It’s hard to accept but it’s true.

Now that you know you’re a proven web addict, would you like to do something to free yourself from the chains of this slavery or let your computer rule your heart & mind all day and night?

Hooked on Internet? Help is a just a click away.

If you’re ready to cut back your web addiction, here are some tips.

Strong Will Power: To accomplish any uphill task, you need to possess a strong will power. It’s needed much more when it’s the case of attaining freedom from web addiction. When at work, shut down all social media tabs and attend all your assignments with rapt attention. While at home, try to do all web activities during your time for coffee, watching television or listening to music so that your family time does not go waste.

Time Management: You’re your best judge when it comes to managing your most valuable asset—time. You need to split your time between your online & real life. Don’t kill your productive hours. Remember each hour counts. So don’t just fritter away time in web slavery. Work hard and party even harder by rewarding yourself with dedicated ‘web leisure’ time, and try not to exceed that time limit, no matter how much tempted you are.

Free yourself from Web addiction & devote proper time to your interests, recreational activities & social obligations.

Technology has overwhelmed your life, my life. It has bred Digital world, which is fascinating but addiction is bad. Confession of Digital Addiction is wise but Freedom from this Slavery is vital for a happy and prosperous life.

In the end, wish you all a very happy Vijayadashami & fun-filled, web-free Dussehra!! 

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.