Social Media Marketing

As the name suggests social media marketing, is the process of using 'social media' to promote your business. This refers to services such as Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo Answers, Digg and a bunch of other web 2.0 properties (Hubpages etc)

Like any marketing model, social media marketing aims to drive increased amounts of traffic to a website(s) and occasionally pass on some SEO credit to boost rankings.

I find Answer Assault is good for Yahoo Answers, and SENuke is good for the other web 2.0 properties and SEO work. If you are looking for Twitter and Facebook applications, there are a number of mass following/adding/messaging bots available.

The number-one question marketers most want answered is how to track to social media return on investment.

The major channels of Social Media Marketing are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Some times Blogging is considered part of Social Media Marketing because your posts on Blogs can be synchronized through all Social Media Websites. Depending on who your target customers are one Social Media website may more effective for you. For example if you are trying to target women of some specific age groups Facebook may be the best and if you are trying to target Business Owners, LinkedIn may be the one. There are many tools for using social media and their major functions vary from branding (getting likes, followers, etc), statistics (help you analyze your campaign), campaign management (help you manage your campaigns and schedule on-time interaction, actions, posts, etc) and many others. Only on twitter there are more than 2000 apps in the market with different functions. Social Media plays an important role for businesses as those websites all are of the top 100 top visited websites in the world and have many daily visitors so with a targeted campaign you can find and convert the prospective customers you are looking for.

I've used most of major social media site like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube to promote my business and build my branding. There a tons of tools that help you to manage your accounts in social media. Social media is also a nice tool for your business costumer service. It allows your costumer to communicate directly to the owner and learn lots from their feed backs. Make sure to have their testimonials, it builds the credibility of your product/services and your business as well.

The benefit of social marketing is it's viral-ability. Meaning it's easier to get people to "share" your message. Sometimes it's a purposeful share, but most of the time a person may be sharing your message without even knowing it. For instance, when a person hits the "like" button/link on a website, they're actually sharing that information with everyone on their facebook list. And the same goes w/the Google +1 button. If the person has a Google Plus account and they click a +1 button on your website, they are effectively sharing your page w/ all of the connections they have on Google Plus.

And as far as tracking goes - there are plenty of tools out there for tracking the bottom line. You can easily know if your social media marketing is working.

The best part that comes out of social media marketing is the fact that you create a dialogue with your potential customers. Even if you do not receive a sale from a connection, you can increase your network base. Have a website/blog in which you can send your connections you've made through social media marketing and keep on providing them with valuable content. A sale may come of it but if what you're saying is valuable enough, you'll gain more than one customer :p

Social media marketing, as it pertains to businesses is a great way to stay in touch with your customer base. Now, if we're talking about businesses that already have websites, than things like Facebook and Twitter can help to send traffic to those pages. They can also help to build an email list for the business. For example, you can offer some type of special promotion to your Facebook friends and Twitter followers for them to sign up.

It also helps a business to gain awareness of what people are saying about them. They can find out about the "word on the street." A business can also check out their competitors and see what their competitors customers like about them (or what they dislike).

Now, as far as will social media marketing make a business money, well, it depends on the business. An electrician may not get very many new customers through twitter, but he may be able to get more repeat business by staying in touch with his current clientele.

In this day and age social media marketing is critical since so many people rely on it and use it in their daily lives. Facebook is a great example because it has such a vast audience, from all over the world.
Businesses can use social media outlets, like Facebook, to reach out to customers and clients, from all around the world.

I am curious how many companies shy away from social media marketing and I wonder how that effects their business.

Wikipedia isn't going to teach you social media marketing.

What you need to do is gauge the user's mood and state of mind while they're browsing social media sites and then just cater to it. People are in one mindset while they are on Google.com and a totally different mindset while they're on Facebook.

The important thing to understand about social media marketing is that it is simply the infusion of marketing into the social discourse online. When you understand marketing to be a disciple, focused on understanding and reaching specific market, and you understand that social media host and hold data of people grouped into specific groups based on interest, social status and other important criteria. You soon understand why social media marketing is a powerful concept if harnessed intelligently.

I like what Mark Brownlow from EmailMarketingReports stated in an interview on our blog recently. He said: We aren't email marketers. We are marketers who use email. Each channel has it's own strengths and weaknesses. For example, I've found Twitter to be very effective at building brand, networking and building relationships. Facebook can also be strong for brand building. As Rockong explained so well, it's not a direct line to sale and as others have pointed out, it can be hard to account for, but worth it as an overall combined marketing strategy.

Social media marketing is really just the digitizing of many good marketing/business practices which in the past haven't had quite the "oomph" they may have deserved. Word-of-mouth, for example, is now even more powerful when you consider the average Twitter user has 75-150 "followers."

As others have pointed out, it's as much about listening and engaging people in conversation as it is about talking. Consumers move between these social channels very intuitively and just expect brands to be there. That's not to say that the conversation is more important than the conversion. At the end of the day, it's about the conversion, but the conversation which starts on a network such as Twitter can lead to more dialogue in email or your blog and hopefully on a landing page where the conversion happens.

Regards,
jim

To simply define it to you, SMM (Social Media Marketing) is the method of promoting your product via different social media networks or outlets e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Google+, Digg, Yahoo Answers, and the rest of other sites related to these where it allows you to interact with your products and build personal or business relationships. From the word itself, Social = to interact with other being irregardless of what it your objectives, may it be personal or business.

Simple Definition

Social media marketing refers to promoting your business using the social media networks, which include but not limited to Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc.

Benefit

This benefits your online business because these are internet social media, which means that is where people are found. But you need to be careful not to just start by selling to those people. Start by contributing to their lives by sharing something of value. Otherwise, they can avoid entertaining what you try to sell. First build trust. On Facebook, you can also make some ads at an affordable cost. So Fan pages are great on FB.

Tools

Facebook has some tools especially when promoting some pages. Some plugins are available, which do the postings on social media at the click of a button (on WordPress- that is the platform I know much at least). However, such is not that much encouraged as you won't be interacting with your audience and yet that is how relationships are built.

I hope that helps.

Simply put, social media marketing is getting the customer on your side and engaging them in a conversation while at the same time enabling them to share your product story with their own friends. With social media marketing, you are gaining the customer's trust (on Facebook, Pinterest, elsewhere) so they feel good about sharing what you have to say (tweets, posts, pics etc) with those they love most.