Social Media Marketing has grown substantially since its inception with Classmates.com in 1995. According to Wikipedia SMM is ‘information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies that is intended to facilitate communications, influence and interaction with peers and with public audiences, typically via the Internet and mobile communications networks. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio.’
Marketing, Lead Generation and Brand Development has never been more important for Small Business. Social Media provides a window for SMB’s to gain significant market share online.
Small business owners said:
“ I post on blogs and BBS because I can express myself to millions of people at once.”
” I like the rush, and I feel empowered.“ I believe the bloggers and their ideas. They are my friends and will tell me the truth, unlike ” advertisements.”
The reality is Social Marketing does empower the Small Business. It permits a Small Business to express their brand and market services provided the information supplied is creative and thoughtfully presented. Your information can be more believable and attract thousands if not millions of viewers. Social marketing web properties usually rank in the top 100 on major search engines. By leveraging their strength small business can ‘piggy-back’ on the Social site supporting high organic links and visibility. I would suggest that by developing an effective strategy a business can achieve higher visibility with Social sites then with Pay per Click (PPC) and SEO combined. Why? The viral component just does not come into effect with PPC. A strong anchor site with imbeds from various other sites will cause viewers to ‘fav’, digg, imbed, link, tag and RSS the content. Over several months you will see increased traffic to information relating to your services.
Do not:
a) Blatantly advertise your product
b) Stuff logos and links everywhere
c) Do not copy work, writings from other people. If you are referencing research then reference correctly.
Do:
a) Write creatively
b) Mash and embed all relevant material including other works
c) Keep information to a small digestible size
d) Strategically cross-link
Effective Social Maketing Sites for SMB’s:
1) YouTube.com Video Sharing
2) SlideShare.net Slide Sharing
3) WordPress.com Bblogging
4) digg.com Bookmarking
5) Twitter.com Short Blogging
6) Facebook.com Personal Networking
7) Linkedin.com B2B Networking
pixel2life.com Graphic Design
9) sphinn.com/ Internet Marketing
10) activerain.com Real Estate
Source for Quotes: http://china.seekingalpha.com/article/30979
4 Comments
March 22, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Good article Tim! I started twittering a month ago. Wouldn’t want to flood the comments here. But SMM is certainly an integral part of what makes the new Marketing.
March 22, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Yes – really now digging my teeth into it and have seen how it will and already is transforming the broad based advertising model we have seen in past years.
March 28, 2009 at 12:59 pm
I saw this ppc article and I just wanted to share it with everyone
http://www.ehow.com/how_4776336_pay-per-google-adwords.html
I have been using the same program and it’s increased my ppc profits ever since.
March 31, 2009 at 1:28 am
It really does work – you have ensure you have good coverage of your own brand name online – so when people search your brand – they can find you organically