Think Big with Social Media Marketing

There is a black hole in the Internet marketing world.  The incredible success of sites like Digg, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Delicious have led to the creation of a new type of Internet marketing that offers rewards to satiate the desires of any business that relies on the Internet.  Social Media Marketing (SMM) is the current “Golden Boy” of Internet marketing.

That’s great!  Now what is it and why are so many businesses not doing it?

First, we’ll start with the second question.  A ton of businesses ARE doing it - at least they’re trying to.  The problem is, they’re doing it wrong.  Even worse, they are hiring agencies that are doing it wrong.  It’s such a gray area to define and track the success of a quality social media marketing campaign that many companies, as is always the case, are popping up to exploit the buzz but not to deliver the results.

It isn’t that they’re not trying.  All (or most) are trying really, really hard to achieve success with their clients.  The problem is that most have only a basic knowledge of how social media marketing really works.  There are LITERALLY a single-digit number of firms out there that “get it” amongst the hundreds that are currently offering the service.

Social media marketing is hard.  What works today won’t work tomorrow.  What worked yesterday and not today may work tomorrow again.  The real problem can be drawn from Star Trek lore.  The primary advantage that the Borg had was that they were willing and able to adapt.  That is what social media sites do.  They do not want to be gamed.  They do not want to be the tools of Internet marketers.  So, they adapt, and many are very good at adapting.

With that out of the way, “What is social media marketing?”  Websites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit are able to send tremendous amounts of traffic to media sources.  It is very possible to get over 100,000 visitors to a blog post, news story, image, or video in a very short amount of time.  When applied to business, this can be an extremely effective way to garner exposure for a website, service, or product.

It also creates links.  Links are the silver bullet of search engine optimization as well as a separate source of traffic.  Stories that hit the front page of Digg, for example, can receive hundreds, even thousands of inbound links to the site that made it to the front page.  There are blogs and websites out there that depend on social media sites as their primary source of traffic.

All of this sounds great (again) but how will this benefit MY business?

Social media marketing is exposure.  It can take a company that nobody knows about and make it visible to the masses.  It can take a company that everybody knows about and put it in a good light.  It can take new and innovative concepts and launch them out into the world wide web in ways that no other form of marketing can accomplish.

It’s sexy.  Forgive the description, but taking a relatively unknown product and putting it out to the world through social media can have a viral effect that builds stars in particular niches overnight.

There is so much that goes into social media marketing.  The benefits can be tremendous.  The risks are equally high.  Still, if you’re not in, you’re out, as the saying goes.  An entire book could be written on the subject.  The problem is, by the time it got published and hit the shelves, it would be completely outdated.  Such is the way of Internet marketing.

Learn more about social media marketing by clicking on Social Media Inquiries and requesting information.