Social media – whether is social bookmarking or social marketing – is one of the fastest growing areas on the internet. Millions of businesses are now accessing these sites and promoting themselves, their businesses and their products or services – there are three main reasons why!
1 It’s Free:
Pure and simple – it is FREE. Compared to many other forms of online promotions – social media is free to access and free to participate. The only real investment is in your time.
2 You’re In Control:
With social media, you can stay in control. You control who you allow onto your contacts lists, you control where you go, who you talk to and what type of discussions you participate in.
3 It’s Effective:
Interact within these social communities for the benefit of everyone, not just yourself, and the results can be tremendous. You may find your businesses profile and reputation growing, the number of quality visitors to your sites growing, and, ultimately, your sales and profits growing.
Social media is an interactive event. Where old fashioned marketing focused on the business and products for the benefit of the business, online social marketing needs to focus on the community. The most important term is ‘social’ – be social, be a part of the community, and the results will speak for themselves.
Hello,
I am not sure I agree with the Free part – some things are but the time investment and strategy takes forethought and does require a commitment of time to setup and maintain. Some community software/services, etc is not free depending on the extent companies want to leverage existing websites and packages. If they want to be able to have solid analytics in social media, etc. there are some serious reputation management analytics packages out there that will help. Many tools are free, like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and others, (unless you purchase advertising on some of these platforms) but it’s more the strategy to engage customers and how to leverage those tools properly that is important. I also don’t think marketers are in control with social media and part of engaging customers in social media is realizing that you are no longer in control. Yes, you choose who to connect to and what conversations to engage in, but that’s not control – that is choosing to engage in conversations that are specifically NOT controlled by marketing teams. Results can be effective if done properly, but jumping in doesn’t guarantee effectiveness.
From looking at this blog, it does appear self serving to your company on link building and SEO and advterising services rather than a conversation on engaging your prospective customers or clients. I am a little troubled by the overt association of social media to link building, PPC, and other more ‘hardcore’ marketing services – I think SM is a different animal and has many more and important benefits than just driving traffic. Just my $.02…would be happy to have a conversation about it
Best,
Adam
Thanks Adam for your $.02 cents and reading our blog
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Social Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking and Social Media Optimization are all names for “social marketing”…it seems these days that everyone has their 2 cents and their own defination of what it means. The social media industry is almost like the SEO industry was 7 years ago, very confusing…most of our clients still have no idea what social media marketing is and how they can incorporate it into their overall web marketing gameplan. The goal of this blog is to share tips, different perspectives and industry happenings…eventually once most prospective clients fully get this stuff we will be happy to engage them for sure!
Anyway, thanks again for reading!
Is SMO going to be the “buzzword”? I think it will likely win out, Social Media Optimization, but of course people will continue to call it different things.
I agree with Adam about the time investment. It is a huge investment of time and anergy to network at social networking sites effectively.
I think companies are going to have to hire in-house people or outsource to companies that specialize in SMO if they want to get real benefits from social media.
And to think I was one of those guys that thought social bookmarking was just a fad.
Let’s take it one step farther and realize that the day of the static website, online brochure type is over. That type of site half the time does not even convert well and is usually built by a web designer, not a web marketer.
Blogs are so highly read and now mainstream that most Internet users will say they do not know what a blog is and have never read one. Thay have they just do not know it.
I have very little interest in reading an article that does not offer comments and look forward to that interaction that comes from blog comments back and forth. Forums? Forget it, I can ask a question on a blog article and usually get better advice back than any forum and I don’t have to register.
As participation and social media goes if it takes too much time it is because you are doing it wrong. Decide on one site to participate in and put all your energies into that profile on that site.
Facebook is the way to go. I hardly spend much time there but I already see a conversion rate of 8 to 9 percent.
Social bookmarking, then Digg is for you or Propeller.
The only thing that I require is that the social site allows me to have an outgoing link to my site and does not block it with nofollow. A little tip here too. Just because a site is behind a login does not mean that Google cannot not get in and spider the site and find that outgoing link on a powerful profile.