Social Media Marketing

Web sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Flicker, Wikipedia, Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Technorati, and thousands of other similar web sites, blogs and Wiki are collectively called Social Networking Sites.

Originally intended to provide outlets for individuals to connect to other individuals, these social networking sites provide excellent opportunities for businesses to stay in touch with customers and prospects when used correctly.

One of the primary advantages of having a presence on one or more social media sites is that these pages get indexed very quickly by Google.

While you could wait weeks or months to have a new web site page work its way to a top 10 listing, it's not unusual for a social media site entry to reach a top 10 listing within 24 hours after it's posted.

You can also generate quite a bit of traffic with a well-placed comment on one or more of these sites. A friend of mine generated over 1,200 to his product squeeze page hits in a little over an hour with just one mention on StumbleUpon.

Tips for Leveraging the Power of Social Media Marketing

1. Spend time lurking on the sites you plan to target for your marketing activities. Learn your audience and how they use the site before you create a campaign that can do more harm than good.
2. Research your competitors to see how they're using social marketing to augment their advertising. Emulate the successful ones without totally knocking them off.
3. Social Marketing is NOT drive-by marketing. Once you make a commitment to a social marketing site, you need to stay engaged. Respond to questions and comments directed to you, and participate in other conversations and message threads. And stay above the fray by resisting the urge to post negative comments about your competitors or their products/services.
4. Don't expect every comment or story you post to be an instant hit. In fact, you can expect most posts to generate little or no impact. You're not trying to hit a home run every time. Social Marketing is a long-term commitment. Don't try to speed things up or you could end up shooting yourself in the foot.
5. If you're clueless about Social Networking or you simply want to make sure you're as up-to-date on the process as possible, visit Mashable. It's the Social Networking site for people who want to learn all there is to learn about Social Networking.

And remember - that which cannot be measured cannot be valued. Use Google Analytics and other link tracking tools to keep tabs on the amount of traffic being generated by your Social Media Marketing efforts. As time goes by you'll be able to drop the sites that aren't paying off and focus your efforts on the ones that are.