Social Media has become very important in an internet
marketers promotional arsenal. Simply
described the social media is a platform where people gather and form
communities to discuss and share information.
The platform - a website which provides technology for integration of
the written word, audio and video - can be used by members to post their
information in any form. The internet
marketer could use these communities to place subtle messages or provide links
during his own conversations in a unobtrusive and natural manner.
One of the greatest distinctions between an industrial or
company website and the social media sites is that the content originates from
users and not the promoters of specific business.
Internet marketers could effectively use this to contribute
his own content to interested communities and create huge traffic to his own
web sites.
The social media could be in different forms offering
different applications to its communities.
Some of the major social media applications are:
Blogs such as blogger.com and wordpress.com. You can create your own web pages once you
set up your account and post content regularly.
Micro blogs. The most
famous is Twitter.com. Twitter allows
send and receives one sentence communications of 140 characters. Once you sign up you can chose to receive
messages from people who share similar interest. The messages can also be received through SMS
and RSS.
Then there are the social networking sites such as facebook.com, linkedin.com, orkut.com or myspace.com being the most popular
ones. The networking sites offer many
interesting applications for users to share content and create huge common
interest communities. The networking in these sites has become so popular and
widespread that some of the organizations have banned them from being used by
their staff to increase productivity.
The book marking sites such as delicious.com and
stumbleupon.com are the other major social book marking sites of the countless
such sites. These sites allow the user
to find pages and store them online. The
users can also post comments and rate different websites, pages or videos. These can then be accessed by interested peer
user communities based on the recommendations.
Internet marketing community can use news sharing sites such
as digg.com or reddit.com. In these news
mediums you can share any web pages you found interesting on the internet with
your own comments and voting on them.
Based on the voting they will be ranked up or down on the site. Then there are the photo sharing and video
sharing. We all know flickr and
youtube.com.
Now there are tons of other such social media sites for the
internet marketer to make use of and profit from quick traffic through these
sources. However a word of caution. Don't use these sites blatantly for posting
buy messages or self promotion as the people using these communities have come
together for sharing interest and fun and blatant commercial exploitation could
have you banned quickly.
The best way to use these communities to market is to
blend in with the community and let your products be discovered naturally by
the users. Once you learn the art of
marketing to these communities you could be generating huge and profitable
internet traffic. You can download some
very useful tools from the download site here for your social marketing.
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