Posted by admin in Social Marketing is all the rage. You have no doubt heard of Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter, StumbleUpon or MySpace. The thing these social sites have in common is they rely on interactions between people - using technology as the means to facilitate those interactions (or conversations).
The way social marketing helps bring visibility to your website is similar to organic search optimization. The difference is it focuses on getting good online visibility, links, and targeted traffic using the social media sites as a conduit.
When you incorporate links (buttons) and other tools that facilitate book marking, cloud tagging, voting or rating of content, you help online visitors “talk” to one another and spread their content via the main social sites. According to Wikipedia:
Social Media Marketing, on the other hand, is an off-page characteristic of Social Media. This includes writing content that is remarkable, unique, and newsworthy. This content can then be marketed by popularizing it or even by creating a “viral” video on YouTube and other video sites.
Social Media is about being social, so this off-page work can include getting involved in other similar blogs, forums, and niche communities. Search Engine Marketing or SEM involves utilization of all available Social Networking platforms to brand a product using Search Engine Optimization or SEO techniques of communication, to the end consumer.
Various “forms” of social media are:
- Forums
- Blogs or Weblogs
- Wikis
- Podcasts
- YouTube
- Plaxo
- Jaiku
- Youmeo
Social Media Optimization is the process by which you create and utilize various strategies into your overall web design plan to get your content more widely distributed across multiple Social Media networks. This helps drive more traffic to your website.
The SMO part is the strategy you and your web designer develop (your “on page” efforts) to make your site social friendly. This type of optimization includes adding links to services such as Digg, Newsvine, Reddit or Del.icio.us so your pages can be submitted to these services.
The SMM part is what is known as an off-page attribute of Social Media and includes developing content that is unique and newsworthy. Once developed this content can be “marketed” and popularized through such sites as YouTube or other video sites. This type of strategy is most effective when your video goes viral.
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