Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing also known as social influence marketing is the act of using social influencers, social media platforms, online communities for marketing, publication relations and customer service. Common social media marketing tools include Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.

In the context of Internet marketing, social media refers to a collective group of web properties whose content is primarily published by users, not direct employees of the property (e.g. the vast majority of video on YouTube is published by non-YouTube employees).

Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites.

Social media marketing has two important aspects:

(1) Adding links to services such as Digg, Reddit and Del.icio.us so that their pages can be easily 'saved and submitted' to and for these services.

(2) Building ways that fans of a brand or company can promote it themselves in multiple online social media venues.

Benefits of SMM:

a) It creates awareness of great content
b) It increases traffic, RSS subscriptions and more to a site – while traffic is a benefit, sites need visitors to take some sort of action, are RSS subscriber counts are often a sound metric.
c) It builds the authority of the content publisher – done properly, others in the space will begin to view the article publisher as an authority on the topic of the social media submission, which leads to further opportunities and sales.
d) It helps develop a network of similar interest individuals – many of those supporting social media submissions will have some interest in the topic, and therefore make good allies for future submissions.
e) It ultimately builds links, which leads to improved search engine positioning. As this form of link creation is completely a function of quality of content, it is a very search engine friendly ways of building links.