What is Social Media Marketing?
Social Media is a category of sites based on user participation and user-generated content. In short, it is any online technology that allows people to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other.
Social media is more than just a passing phase and it is reshaping online marketing. The key is communication and conversations rather than broadcasting, in other words ‘word-of-mouth marketing’ on a much bigger scale.
Traditional marketing uses ‘Outbound Marketing’ techniques to reach people – for instance distributing messages using print media, tradeshows, radio and TV, and generating leads with direct mail, telemarketing and emails. Now that people control how they receive marketing messages from these methods, with spam control, caller ID and more, it is harder to introduce them to new products without an introduction. Now they can ignore these interruptions.
Inbound marketing draws customers to you rather than pushing messages at them – imagine a magnet rather than a sledgehammer approach! Inbound marketing requires ‘permission’ from users and includes social media, SEO/SEM, blogging, and RSS feeds.
How to make SMM a success
Social Networking is not a passing phase any more than email is. It is a low-cost, highly effective means to communicate your message and increase your market awareness. We can create a SMM campaign based on your needs to include any range of these multimedia tools, for example:
- Social Networks: (e.g. Facebook, Bebo, Myspace)
- Blogs: (e.g. boingboing, Techcrunch)
- Wikis: (e.g. Wikipedia, wikiHow)
- Podcasts: (e.g. itunes)
- Forums: (e.g. ubuntuforums.org)
- Social Bookmarking and Content Communities
- Microblogging (eg. Twitter, Joomla)
- and more…