SMM stands for Social Media Marketing and is the way we use social media websites to market to the “New Internet”, commonly referred to as WEB 2.0.
There are many elements to social media (not just facebook), which we discuss below.
In the past few years social media has turned the web upside down. What really matters is that Social Media is here to stay, and 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 needs to tap into!
When implemented properly, and with a flare for excellent content writing, 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 Media Explained
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 you need to do when thinking of implementing a social media strategy for your company (and believe me, you should!), is find the right medias to express your company on and use these new and exciting market tools to generate 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
- Social Networking/community sites - Some say it started with Myspace or Facebook, but in reality Friends Reuinited was around way before this and was the major kickstart to the social networking community that we know today.Social networking websites are sites that have a “community of subscribed people” who have a profile about themselves, and they have different ways of communicating.
This can be via a wall, messaging system, video uploads and many other medias.Some examples include Facebook, Myspace, Digg, Twitter, Linked-In, Delicious. Search engines now index these sites, therefore links to your site from a social networking page could be taken into account by the search engines. - Blog sites - 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” there 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.
