The Key to Social Media Marketing Success

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Overview: Social media marketing and social bookmarking sites are becoming increasingly more popular on the internet today. Generally speaking, they are sites on which communities use to share information, discuss and vote for, but how can sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and YouTube help you to become successful ethically online?

Using social networking sites, you can promote articles or web pages that you feel will benefit the internet community. Your goal is to create a buzz and have people comment, bookmark or share things that they find interesting or useful.

So How do You Get Started?  Creating content on your web site that is interesting or useful to a site visitor is the first step, without this your site will not be ‘sticky’ and will not be deemed as popular by users of social networking sites. Writing ‘How to’ articles is a good example of useful content, i.e. ‘How to shortlist candidates for web design in Bournemouth’.

Why Use Social Media Marketing?  Although it won’t make you a direct profit, social marketing will drive traffic to your site that is targeted towards your theme or ‘niche’. Having a clean and well thought out design on your web site will let visitors navigate through other pages and find other areas of the site that are profitable to you. You can also embed hyperlinks within your article content that can link to products or other pages.

Increasing Initial Traffic to your site:  The main goal of social network marketing is to drive targeted traffic to your site, this can come directly from a social media site, or a site that has linked to yours after finding it through a social bookmark or tag. When you post on a social media site, you can get immediate targeted traffic if your post title and article description draws people in, try to think of teasers that get people interested and want to read more.

Gaining Longer Term Traffic:  The more links you have pointing to your web site the more popular your site becomes in the eyes of Google and other search engines, this can make a massive impact on your search engine positioning results over time and will drive even more targeted traffic through search engine results.

Every time you post on a social media networking site, you increase your site’s exposure which means that people will be more likely to link directly to your site. This can be a very powerful way of building natural back links to your web site which is looked on favourably by search engines.

Cost compared to traditional marketing:  One of the best things about social media marketing is that it costs nothing! When you compare this to more traditional marketing methods such as Pay Per Click you can really start to see the benefits. Effectively you are creating a steady flow of free organic traffic.

Increase Awareness of Your Web Site:  Through this method of marketing you will increase the brand awareness of your site and you can create a buzz about something that relates to your products or services. With the increased popularity of social media, you can not afford to miss out on the trend!

Tags: internet marketing, Search Engine, social marketing, Social Networking, Traffic

How is social media marketing driving E-commerce

The whole world seems to be integrated in the virtual world of social networking websites.  In case of Twitter and Facebook, it is insanely big and it should not come as a surprise if one spends a whole day or more just scaling through these social networking websites.  What started as a hub for friends and like-minded people to meet has quickly turned into something so large that it could set the prospects of your business soaring.  Here are top five reasons why social media can drive e-commerce.

Tags: e-commerce, internet marketing, search engine optimization, sem, SEO, Seo Company India, SMM, social media

The Advantages of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing has come a long way in the past few years. Social media marketing companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have become so expansive that they attract visitors in the millions. It is estimated that visitors watch over 100 million YouTube videos per day. There are more than 30 million active Facebook users, and over 19 million visitors to Twitter. So what exactly is “social media marketing”, and what are some of its advantages?Simply put, social media marketing is a “rendezvous” of multiple online communities, with one goal in mind: to generate exposure. This about it. There are millions of people interacting in these online communities, sharing ideas and opportunities, providing the perfect atmosphere for larger corporations to increase their exposure and attract prospective customers, ultimately perpetuating a cycle of increasing revenue.By allowing supporters of a company the authority to promote their products, an individual is provided compensation for advertising and promoting a product, through various online mediums. Here’s how it happens: someone works as a representative of a company. As a representative, he/she will get paid a fixed rate of X for going onto online forums and interacting with other individuals on messageboards, promoting a certain product. As a result, whoever is a part of that particular online community will get exposure to the company and its products, and they may become a customer. If they do, they may recommend the brand to friends and family. If they do not, they may recommend the brand anyway – the point is, the company is getting exposure, from people, to people.When was the last time you saw a commercial for a product that you suspected was “too good to be true.” You probably did not pay any attention to it, and flipped the channel. What if that same product was advertised on an online forum or blog, by someone who has used the product, and SWORE by it? People are more impressionable when they get a firsthand opinion from someone who does not stand to directly benefit. Many online sales reps aren’t paid. Those “unofficial” reps are still very much heard, and they are much more numerous.This is just one example of social media marketing, but it clearly illustrates its advantages: low costs and higher yields, greater exposure to further establish a company and distinguish it amongst others, and generating overall publicity at the cellular level, so to speak.Ali Hussain2K Computer Solutionshttp://2kcomputersolutions.com

Tags: Advantages, internet marketing, social media, Social Media Marketing

Time to Get Organized With Your Social Media Marketing

Should is a hard word to stomach. Often we’ll tell ourselves “I should do that… ” or “That should be on my to do list.” When it comes to Social Media Marketing, the shoulds are overwhelming. You should be on Facebook. If you’re on Facebook, you should be on Twitter. If you’re on Twitter, you should be posting on Twitter. What, you haven’t set up a Digg.com account? Well, you should…
Most of us get so overwhelmed, that we choose to do nothing. Seems like a bad solution. Let’s take a different approach to Social Media Marketing. I promise there’s not a should in the bunch.
Use the 80/20 Rule to Cut Through the Crap
The 80/20 rule teaches us that 80% of results stem from 20% of our actions. Whenever we talk about Social Media Marketing, the 80/20 rule always comes up. Why? Because so many of the options for in social media are a waste of time.
The 20% (Business Builders)
?Finding great forums to post work
?Writing quality articles about your subject
?Researching great tools to automate your submissions (hint, we discuss them a lot in this blog)
?Guest blogging on great sites
The 80% (Time Wasters)
?Following people on twitter to boost your numbers
?Collecting endless Facebook friends
?Getting caught up in angry battles with forum trolls
?Spending hours looking at Digg.com articles and responding to silly comments
Getting Things Done
GTD is an amazing book by David Allen. If you haven’t read it yet, you’re losing ground to people who have. If you haven’t read it in a while, consider picking it up. There’s always a gem or two that you’ve missed.
The heart of GTD is:
1. Get all of the stuff out of your head and into a list.
2. Decide what the next action is on each item
3. Batch items to make them more efficient (i.e. Make all your phone calls at once, set a time to respond to email, etc.)
4. Once a week, reevaluate your list to make decisions about what’s important and what can be dropped.
Let’s point this thinking towards Social Media Marketing
1. Make a list of everything you’d like to do. Get it out of your head and onto paper.
2. Go through the list and decide if the task is an 80 or a 20. Take a big black marker and cross through the 80’s until you’re down to a handful of tasks that will really make an impact.
3. Now batch these tasks.
Batching Social Media Tasks
A great way to batch social media tasks is with Firefox. Open all of the tabs for a given task and use Firefox to save the set of tabs into a single bookmark (Bookmarks -> Bookmark all Tabs). We use this for a couple of sets:
? Forums: Save all of the common forums you’ve found into a single tab. Then go through and systematically post your article as a new topic in each forum
? Responses: Open all of your social pages and respond to comments in a single sitting.
? Idea Generation: Save your favorite idea generating blogs. Now, when it’s time to write articles, you can scan the headlines and gather ideas all at once.
We batch lots of things to save time and energy. One you’ve learned the idea of batching, you’ll find all sorts of ways to make it work for you.
If it’s worth doing, it’s Worth Re-Evaluating
Just because you’ve been doing something for months, doesn’t mean it’s the best use of your time. Quickly you’ll realize that some things you do generate more buzz, leads, and business than others. It’s useful to schedule a formal time each month to think through all of the things you’ve done and decide what’s working and what’s not. We try to block out time at the end of every month to make sure what we’re doing works.
If you liked this article, please tell your friends about it. If you really liked it, feel free to publish it on your blog or website (please don’t forget to mention www.TheOutsourcingCompany.com/blog as the original source).

Tags: 80/20, Digg.com, Getting Things Done, internet marketing, online marketing, Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing: 4 Reasons To Launch Your Social Web Campaign Now!

Social media marketing is the hottest “business reality-show” that’s generating leads for businesses of all sizes. As every business owner knows, leads are the lifeblood of their companies. Getting a consistent flow of profitable leads today is hard.

At a time when customers use social networking to search, discuss and explore new ideas and opportunities, “Companies have no choice. This is where their customers are going,” reported USA Today on August 27, 2009.

Advice on how to implement various social media marketing opportunities like Facebook, Twitter, Delicious and others abound.  However, like any media campaign, you need to make sure your social media program is strategic, measurable and encompasses the entire spectrums of opportunities that are right for your business.

Four key reasons social marketing will lift your business prospects are:

Bill Bean, president of Green Planning & Coaching noticed right away how adopting social marketing, “changed my approach to marketing completely! I had a website for 2-1/2 years that never brought in a single lead because I had no mechanism to collect email addresses of visitors, no analytics and no promotion through social media. I just launched my new website—and I already have prospects signing up for my newsletter. Amazingly, I’m also already getting responses to blog postings on LinkedIn and other green community sites I learned to participate in.”

Never in the history of consumer selling have companies, from one-person shops to multi-national corporations, been handed such an effective, low-cost opportunity to carry out promotional efforts.  Learn how to leverage this effective new tool for your business or you will soon be left behind.

BIO: Chris Marentis is founder & CEO of GenNext Media, LLC and author of Surefire Social, DIY Guide to Social Media Marketing Success.

Tags: internet marketing, social marketing, Social Media Marketing

The Power of Social Media Marketing

The internet has changed the way we do business-indeed, our whole society–in ways unthinkable even ten short years ago. The sheer connectedness of the World Wide Web is what wowed people then, and still does today. But the “web” is no longer just a collection of servers talking to each other, with all the content controlled by a handful of people who understand how to create HTML pages. Now everybody can connect to the entire world all by themselves, using any number of social networking sites that have the power to create overnight sensations.Social media marketing capitalizes on the popularity and reach of sites like FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, and dozens of others to build communities of common interest. Blogs, chat forums, collaborative sites like Wikipedia, opinion or review sites like ZDnet, educational or tutorial sites like WebMonkey, or gaming and other entertainment sites have the capacity to draw huge audiences all wanting specific things. Companies who create sub-communities within existing communities such as MySpace, or create a new “destination” offering useful information, can lift their brand awareness without overtly marketing their products.Daily or weekly blogs offer useful information and provide a reason for visitors to come back often. Many times, a product’s users, like Harley Davidson enthusiasts or skiers who like a particular manufacturer’s skis, like to come together to discuss the pros and cons, the ways they have customized their products, or new ways to use them. These communities are self-sustaining; the manufacturer merely needs to provide the forum and keep order, while providing new content as needed.Targeted advertising on established sites can return high value for the marketing dollar with little to no additional effort by a company to establish the forum in the first place. However, taking a proactive role in creating a community gives a company more control over its look and feel and content, reducing the chances of illegal uses of the company’s logo or product images degrading the brand.If you thought that MySpace was just for chatty teenagers, think again. Smart companies once embraced the web itself as progressive; now they must continue to think outside the box to capitalize on the full power of social media marketing, or miss out on some golden opportunities.

Tags: Facebook, internet marketing, Myspace, social media, Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing For Beginners

In the recent past years Social Media Marketing and Social Media have dominated and defined Internet marketing. The popularity of social sites like MySpace and social bookmarking sites like Digg has caused this push. Social media has two main components, user generated content and the networking capability allowing you to form groups of friends and others that you can share content with.
Sites like MySpace, Zubby, and Facebook allow users to create profiles using text, videos and pictures to design their pages. These can then be shared with a selected group of other people in a special “friends” network and if the user wishes these pages can be shared over the whole social network.
Sites like Digg, Flickr, Associated Content and YouTube allow users to submit links to their favorite news articles online, pictures, articles, and videos then vote on the content that others have submitted. The most popular content is displayed on the front page of the site and the other pages are available to the general public to browse through. These drive traffic to the site and to the pages that are bookmarked.
There are many different ways to use these types of sites, either together or alone.
The use of these types of sites to promote your products and services is what is known as social media marketing. The types of traffic you get once your content is discovered and becomes well known in social media are primary traffic and secondary traffic.
Primary traffic is the direct traffic from the site that you used to make your site popular. If you are using a site that has fairly heavy traffic like Digg to promote your site you could get a large amount of traffic in a short amount of time so you need to make sure your site can handle the traffic, otherwise it may crash.
Once a site becomes popular on a social media site it gets talked about. When people talk about these sites they post links to the site which draws more traffic to the content. This indirect traffic is the secondary traffic. It is the secondary traffic that continues to flow to your site after the initial surge of direct traffic slows.
The benefits of primary and secondary traffic coming from social media sites include exposure to your site initially. Once your site is known by the general public then organic traffic will begin and repeat visitors start to show up, as long as you have something to entice them to come back.
Natural links to your site are beneficial because they are given by people or companies who have nothing to gain from your business venture. These are generally from relevant sites increasing the likelihood that visitors are going to be genuinely interested in your products and services. These links improve your search engine rankings and improve organic traffic.
Social media marketing allows your site to get exposure in a larger site and to a larger group of people. If your traffic levels off you can use social media marketing to jump start your traffic and work on taking your search engine traffic to the next level.
The alternative for increasing your search engine traffic is using pay per click advertisement. Using pay per click campaigns can help you to sustain increased traffic from the search engines but this traffic comes with a price tag.
Using social media marketing is free and can increase your traffic and your ratings in the search engines. Getting your site notices a couple times a year in the social media arena can make your site popular enough to bring in traffic throughout the year.

Tags: Business Success, Digg, Facebook, internet marketing, Marketing, Myspace, social media, Zubby

Facebook Business Applications and Marketing Tools – Even Create Your Own

The idea behind using a social networking site as Facebook as a venue for doing business is building a user base in the form of a community who respond to you as a person or to your product. If you just turn your page into one big advertisement, you are not going to get much in the way of a response. You need to educate people about the product without coming across as a hard sell.
You want to create the impression that you are here for socializing, not business. People will come to trust you and be more likely to buy your product or service if you can do this.
Facebook has built in tools which can be used to build your business. These include:
- Social Ads
- Pages
- Beacon
- Insights
- Platform
- Polls
These tools can help you to build awareness of your brand through this social networking site and bring in potential clients. Needless to say, you are going to have to learn to use them effectively. Read on to find out how to harness these tools to build your business using social networking sites.
You can learn how to take further advantage of these features by visiting the facebook website business section.
SOCIAL ADS
Social ads have a lot of promise for building your business since they can go directly to the news feeds of your Facebook friends. Anyone who is on your friends list will be able to get the word about your business right on their profile page.
This is also a very easy way of target marketing. You can control exactly who sees your ads – and target marketing is the way to get sales.
FACEBOOK PAGES
You can make a Face book page for a business, just as you would for yourself. This allows people to interact with and even become friends with your business. It is a great way to make a lot of people aware of your product and your brand who would not otherwise.
You know when someone becomes friends with your business on Facebook that you have a potential client; at the very least, they have shown some interest. People can interact with your business as they would with any of their other social networking site friends – they can leave comments and generally enhance the experience of a visit to your page.
You can use this social networking site to your best advantage by adding features that will appeal to your target market and fit in with the brand image you are aiming to create. Quizzes, games, a Facebook group and so on.
FACEBOOK BEACON
Like social ads, Facebook Beacon gives you the ability to build your business by promoting yourself via your Facebook friends news feeds. You can set Beacon to notify all of your Facebook friends whenever you have a new product available, or any other sort of news or information you would like to disseminate amongst your Facebook friends. All you need to do is to add a little code to your Facebook page (this can be done by copy and paste, so no need to panic).
This encourages more interaction with your page, the website of your business and your company in general. This also helps get the word out about your businesses product or service.
Do not fret that you will be mercilessly spamming your Facebook friends and invading their privacy – they can opt out of these updates at any time they choose. You of course have the same ability for Facebook Beacon updates from others.
FACEBOOK INSIGHTS
If you are using facebook as a method of promoting your business you will of course want to know just who is checking out your Facebook page, clicking on your ads and joining your friends list. Facebook Insights is a tool which can give you a lot more detail on these sorts of statistics, which can help you to evaluate the efficacy of your campaign.
Armed with this information you can make the call as to whether viral marketing is working in your favor. Word of mouth is one of the best means of advertising and Facebook can facilitate it on a large scale. Facebook Insights lets you figure out what parts of your campaign are working and which are not as well as giving you valuable demographic information which will help you refine your campaign further.
FACEBOOK PLATFORM
Facebook Platform is an exciting tool for business indeed. Programmers can use this tool to build programs which will work with Facebook and add to the usefulness and fun of your Facebook page. If people like what you have on your page, they will spread the word and this build your client base.
You can add all manner of different applications to your site using this platform. Many opt for games, quizzes and other interactive features. You can have a look at the Applications page on the Facebook site to get an idea what sort of things others are using the platform for. These kinds of features can really help you build your brand image; take advantage of them.
FACEBOOK POLLS
Facebook polls can be a great way to gather demographic information from people using the site. Since you can make the poll interactive and fun to use, you’ll have no trouble gathering data. Best of all, you can target your polling.
You can make sure your polls are targeted just where you want them to be since you already have access to some data such as marital status and age of your Facebook friends. This helps you keep your polling relevant.
Do not forget about these valuable tools – they can really help out your business.
Anyone who is willing to put in just a little bit of effort can make their own applications for Facebook. You just need to learn Facebook Markup Language – there are plenty of tutorials online which can help you learn the ropes of this quickly.
Remember to have a look through what is already out there in terms of Facebook applications before you develop your own. If everyone is already using a very similar application, not too many of your fellow facebook users will be enticed by it. Do something a little different if you want to grab the attentionof people.
CREATING APPLICATIONS FOR BUSINESS
With just a little bit of programming know how, anybody can make and distribute their own applications. You’ll be doing this to build your business and it can make a big difference. Applications can really draw in people and keep them on your site. Games are especially popular and can build your brand while keeping users engaged and entertained.
You would be unwise to neglect the use of these applications available to you through Facebook. They can help get the word out about your business – and that is why you made a Facebook page for your business in the first place, no?
You will also be building a sense of community amongst all of these potential customers which will help you get sales.
Here are a few tips for getting the best results from your applications:
1) Make it relevant
In marketing, relevancy is everything. If your potential customers can not get into it, or if it is unclear how the application ties into your product or service, rethink your application.
2) Privacy policy
Even if they are on facebook to socialize, people still want their privacy to be respected. This is why there are friend lists and groups, to which one must be invited. Privacy is a natural human desire and Facebook facilitates this while still allowing for socialization. Remember to respect the privacy of users and retain that trust you have worked so hard to build with them.
3) Free distribution
Once your application is finished and ready to go, you will distribute it. You can do this by listing it on the site along with all of the other Facebook applications and then invite others to install it. If your facebook friends like your application, they will spread the word.

Tags: Facebook, internet marketing, Marketing, Promotion. Small Business

Your Website Will Have Improved Search Engine Rankings When You Use Social Media Marketing

I am sure you have heard the latest buzzwords, social media, social media marketing, word of mouth marketing, buzz marketing and web 2.0. Where did all these terms come from and will you find these terms in the English language dictionary is debatable. However these terms provide a serious benefit in the search engine optimization ranking services and should not be ignored.

Social media websites and networking web sites provide you an easy way to connect with people who share similar interests like you. Some social networking websites group people with common interests, but some websites are “traditional networking sites” and allow you to search for friends based on your interests. So now how do these websites really operate. In websites like MySpace users share music which was what helped rocket MYspace into the well renown place it is today and in Facebook, users create their personal information that they want shared and use pictures, software programs and audio, videos to display or depict their business environment. In websites like Fastpitch, Joe Popular and Adlandpro the users create product and sale pitches and work with each other. Promotiing your website using these new tools is termed social media marketing.

So how can you take advantage of this obviously new but what seems beneficial activity? When you use social media marketing and social networking , you have the opportunity to expose your website to a much larger group of people. When your site becomes popular in a social media site, people talk about your site and the post that becomes popular. Do this is taking advantage of a form of marketing that you may know it as word of mouth. The additional links means that as you grow these natural links from a large number of relevant websites, your rankings improve in the search engine due to increased organic search traffic.

Another advantage is that search engines programs that roam the web are keen on social media and networking websites and typically go after links on these websites. This means if you have your site link on social networking and bookmarking websites, your search engine optimization ranking is better and your website site will be indexed quickly. Getting bookmarked from different users and different social media websites will definitely help your site rank better on search engines.

Like it or not, social media websites have become an integral part of the internet because social marketing is easy to do, search engines love social links and hence your business by default will benefit. So if you are engaged in operating a website, and search engine optimization is important then you must realign your site to exploit the popular social media websites for increased traffic. To take advantage of this new method of building business you need to know what steps to perform? Well explore search engine optimization services. Also explore social media marketing and the difference to social networking websites.

Tags: Buzz Marketing, internet marketing, search engine optimization, social media, Social Media Marketing, Web 2.0, Word Of Mouth Marketing

Why Is Social Media Marketing So Important?

Social Media Marketing is a modified term of conventional Product and Service Marketing. Social marketing is not about advertising, at least not advertising on its own. It is the art of getting others to talk about your brand or products. Social marketing is the future so learning to get it right is very important.
It’s about finding your customers where they are. Social marketing is not simply buying a banner ad campaign that runs on a social network. It uses marketing techniques to generate discussion and promote information, attitudes, values and behaviors. The benefits of marketing in this way are far too numerous to ignore.
One of the benefits of embracing Social Media Marketing campaigns is Traffic from the Social Network. Traffic is great for any website where the business model is based on site session numbers, page views, advertising impressions and CPC metrics.
As with any form of internet marketing, your campaign needs to be really well thought out, and you must spend a fair amount of time on planning strategy and creating exceptional content. This is followed by promoting and monitoring and tracking the results closely. Take your time and consider your campaign setup carefully, but be sure to get out and participate in this Internet Marketing strategy. Social Marketing is critical to the Internet Marketing Mix.
Many marketers are unsure of how to approach marketing in the social networks or even if they should approach it. The primary aim of social marketing by its original definition is social good, while in commercial marketing the aim is primarily financial.
When compiling your Social Media Network Strategy always keep in mind your customer base and what they want. Do they participate in the social networks online and is this something they would like to see your business involved with. If the answer is yes you might want to start by adding a Blog to your website.
If your employees are into the social networking scene ask them to add articles to the Blog. Always remember to add the company logo, name and any other identifying features to the background.
Once you have that in place you could consider joining one or more of the social networking sites. Choose carefully because there are many out there with some being just a waste of your time. Facebook and MySpace are two of the more popular ones. After joining you can start a group or become a member of a group whose primary interest is your type of business, product or service.
This is a good starting point and once you begin to understand how Social Media Networking operates you can expand your involvement to other areas of interest. Remember Social Networking is the new wave and ignoring it as a strategy to add to your marketing mix could be devastating to your enterprise.
Social marketing is just a smart idea. It’s not just a slogan, public service announcement, or one-time communication or mass media campaign. Social marketing is a powerful tool that can improve an individual’s, a group’s, or a society’s welfare. Social marketing is a relatively new, often misunderstood form of online marketing that is reaping huge rewards for website owners who incorporate it into their marketing plan.

Tags: internet marketing, Internet Marketing Strategy, Marketing, social marketing, Social Media Marketing