Social Media Marketing

New Marketing Channels for a Changing Internet!

It’s hard to go anywhere in the world these days without meeting someone who has heard of Facebook or Youtube. These are now core elements of what makes up the world wide web and what we expect to see on search results from Google, Yahoo and Bing.

So how can we take these large scale platforms and market our websites and products to the billions of visitors per year?

Social Media Explained?

---

SMM stands for Social Media Marketing and is the way we use social media websites to market to the “New Internet”, commonly referred to (in our industry, anyway) as Web 2.0.

Before launching into the world of social media optimisation it is worth stopping to discuss what is understood by social media.

Wikipedia describes social media as:-

“online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts and wikis.”

What we do is find the right media channels to express your company on and use these new and exciting market tools to generate links, further gateways into your site and brand association.

Social media networks are huge and growing daily – Facebook has 300+ million users that you can market you website to. SMM provides new gateways to your website – think of social networking as a marketing channel to promote your company and brands.

Which Social Media?

---

What is important, is that Social Media is pretty much ingrained in the way that people now use the web. It has the power to literally make or break a business. Just think of this; Facebook has over 300 million users. That’s 300 million people all using 1 site! This is something your business should consider connecting with.

When implemented properly, and with a flare for original content, a social media campaign can result in massive exposure, higher website traffic and and new natural links to improve those all important search engine results page rankings.

Social Networking Websites

Blog Websites

Blogs are websites or pages of a website that are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or videos.Blogs are a fantastic way of creating fresh content for your website / company and telling the search engines and social networking sites about this fresh content. Blogs are also used in link baiting.

• Forum sites – Forums are community sites where topics, or “threads”, are talked about via people “posting” their opinions on the forum page.These can be used to link back to your website, providing the forum thread topic is relevant and the link is actually useful to the users on the forum.
• Articles & Comments- News articles can be from news pages or blogs and these can be used in the same way as forums, in order to link back to your website, again providing the article topic is relevant and the comment link is actually useful to the users reading the article.