Social media marketing is marketing through social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. Social media marketing has the ability to interact much more personally and dynamically than traditional marketing.
 
Social media marketing is used to promote products and services. It can also do a great deal of good if it is used appropriately to boost brand awareness and overall visibility on the internet. Enhancing and retaining a business’ reputation can effectively be done through social media marketing.
 
Social media is the term for a collective group of web properties whose content is mostly published by users. It has 3 essential aspects:
Creating a buzz or news worthy events that attract attention. The buzz is the part that makes social media marketing succeed. The message is replicated through user contact, not through paid advertising.
Building ways for fans of a company or brand to promote that company or brand in multiple online media venues.
Having conversations. Social media marketing is not controlled by the organization; users are allowed to participate and hold discussions.

In addition to marketing through social media sites, there are many specialized social sites that might be the perfect venue for specific products. Social media sites give the marketer a place to spread the word and to interact with customers as well as allowing customers to interact with each other.
 
That can be a great jumping off point to go viral and establish a grassroots effort. Viral marketing is an effective internet technique that is very closely tied to social media marketing. It is a promotional concept where people fans voluntarily add to the marketing campaign by spreading your message simply because they believe in your goods and services.
 
Social media brings people together. The sites are separated into groups, according to people’s interests and the way in which they use the social site/tool. The social media groups might have the same subject focus as your business and may be used to facilitate the process of getting visitors interested in your goods and services and subsequently turning the visitors into potential customers, and eventually, customers.
 
The purpose of social media marketing is not only to draw traffic and attention to your website, it is also to promote and spread ideas among your target audiences. You can use social media marketing to stimulate feelings and goodwill connected to a specific event, business, or website.
 
Social media marketing is a methodologic and strategic strategy of establishing your reputation, brand, and influence within communities of supporters, readers, and potential customers.
 
Is it worth spending so much time on social media marketing? Definitely.  Your success on the Internet is primarily based on one thing, the visibility of your website. Increasing the visibility of your website using social media marketing and SEO will give you more exposure and build your well-known Internet identity more effectively than just merely advertising your website.
 
Will social media marketing improve your search engine ranking? Absolutely. Social media marketing increases the accessibility to your website. Linking to relevant websites or higher ranked pages will not only bring more visitors but also improve the quality of visitors who visit your website.
 
Your social media marketing strategy, when planned perfectly, will overwhelmingly increase your visibility and exposure on the internet.

Social Media Marketing

In addition to being a great standalone marketing strategy, social media marketing is also widely used in concert with search engine optimization. One of the reasons social media marketing has been so widely adopted by those in the SEO industry is because of the dramatic impact that social media has directly on search engine listings. Social Marketing Network that connects advertisers and bloggers through an online advertising marketplace. Advertisers are able to target blogs based on conversational topics and make cash sponsorship offers to the bloggers who publish them. Bloggers can make money by either placing display advertisements on their blog or by writing sponsored content. The sponsorships offered through the SocialSpark marketplace allow advertisers to build buzz, generate traffic and maximize social media exposure

Social Networking is a kind of social structure that is constructed by an individual or some organizations by certain kind of mutuality say friendship, knowledge, business, beliefs etc. To name a few websites like face book, my space, twitter, orkut are among leading networking websites, within a short span they have gained a huge popularity. The advent social networking made the online business to flourish to a wide extent along with linking with friends and associates. The network should be made open so that innovative ideas and opportunities are generated for the members. The concept of social networking is also used to analyses what kind of interaction is made between different organizations, specifying the casual connections that unite the executives, along with link of each employee at different organizations. With social networking, the companies are able to enhance their business, strategies and preclude competition.

The idea is that social networks are similar to search engines, where the goal is to ensure that the most relevant and interesting content bubbles up to the top. On sites like Digg it means having enough votes from the community to move your news article to their front page, while on a site like MySpace, your measure of popularity is all about how many friends you can get.

So the question is how can marketers in the auto space use social networking sites to your SEO advantage?

The answers are surprisingly straightforward.

Get involved with different social networking sites

The easiest way to start is by simply building a profile for your brand or product on sites like MySpace, Second Life and CarDomain. The self-publishing tools these sites offer are easy to use and accessible to everyone. You may want to build a professionally designed presence for yourself (like Honda’s MySpace page), or put one together that uses existing templates offered by the community. To get the SEOHelpline benefits you want, you need to include links back to your official website.

Now, here’s the important thing to remember: Once you’ve built your presence on these sites you must then stay engaged with the people who visit your page.

You can do this by periodically posting new content relevant to these audiences and responding to friend requests you receive. You will soon find that the users of these sites will start adding their own content on your page and linking back to you. The SEOHelpline benefit here is that you establish well-regarded search engine content that also links directly to your company’s web presence.

To interact with ‘tagging’ sites like Digg, Netscape and Del.icio.us, submit news that you feel is relevant to the readers of these sites. If the news you post is compelling and timely enough for readers, their audience will cast their approval by voting for your news. The more votes you receive, the higher up the list your news feature will appear.

The SEOHelpline benefits here are the direct links from well-trafficked pages to your site. However, the second benefit is a bit more grassroots and possibly even more valuable to your SEOHelpline efforts in the long run: Your news that is featured on these sites is now positioned to be picked up by bloggers who scour ‘tagging’ sites looking for their next news item. Once these bloggers start picking up your stories and provide multiple, well-regarded links, the SEOHelpline benefit can be quite substantial for your site.  

Build relationships with other well-regarded community members

Even though becoming an active member on these sites will help your SEOHelpline efforts, building relationships with other well-regarded members is a great strategy for promoting your own material. On CarDomain, we’ve seen members grow their network simply by posting useful comments on other member’s ride pages.

Some enterprising business members take this a step further, seeking to address the automotive questions other popular members are having. However, instead of presenting the company perspective through unsolicited advertising, they actually engage users with detailed repair recommendations. The benefit here is that this popular member who receives a great answer provides tons of visibility and credibility by recommending the service to their friends.

On ‘tagging’ sites the relationship you want to develop with other popular members is a bit more straightforward. In order to bubble your content to the top of a news category you will need others to vote for your news.

One way of accomplishing this is by introducing yourself to other members and forming an informal network. What this means is that everyone submits their newly posted news to this network and anyone who feels it is a quality story will add their vote to it.

Here are three ways that social media impacts

1) Getting quality, relevant inbound links

It’s no secret that a successful social media marketing campaign can result in thousands of new inbound links to your site. It’s also no secret that inbound links are one of the most important things that influence the rankings of your site. Put two and two together, and it’s easy to see how social media can be a great way to improve your rankings.

The best thing about this is that the majority (if not all) of the links that come from a social media marketing campaign are natural links; they’re not reciprocated, bought, or solicited

2) Using social media websites for reputation management

Lots of social media sites, especially the more popular ones, rank very well within the search engines. This can be both a positive and negative thing when it comes to managing your reputation.

On one hand, it is very easy to control the first page of results by leveraging these sites. Get people talking about your company or site positively on Digg, MySpace or YouTube, and you might end up with those almost as “good references,” listings that show up on the first page of search engine results for your name, along with your own site.

On the other hand, if you’re not careful, it can be very easy for someone to tarnish your brand with social media. Take Comcast for example; if you look at the first page of results on Google for comcast, you will notice that there is a video on YouTube of a Comcast technician sleeping on a customer’s couch.

3) Ranking pages on social media websites

Do you have a new site that you’re having trouble ranking? Consider trying to rank a page on a social media site instead. Like I mentioned above, these sites rank extremely well on the search engines. Their domains are very powerful and with a few links to an internal page, it has a great shot of ranking, even for competitive keywords.

So if you’re launching a brand new site and you know it’s going to be awhile before it ranks, you might want to consider uploading some videos to YouTube or creating a MySpace profile and building a few good links to it. I’m not saying it’s better to have these pages rank than your own site, but it’s definitely better than not having anything ranked.

As you can see, there are a number of situations where social media can affect your SEO efforts, both positively and negatively. In fact I’m willing to argue that it’s becoming more of a necessity to learn how to use social media in concert with SEO. It is also important that you are conscience of the impact that it can cause to your reputation and you manage that effectively, but that’s a separate post for another day.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Social Media Optimization (SMO) are two new phrases that popped up last year to define marketing through social media and social networking sites. There seems to be a lot of confusion about what each of them mean and what exactly they define, which is bound to happen with any new phrase. Even when potential clients contact us there seems to be a lot of confusion between the two.

SEOHelpline refers to the process of refining a website (optimizing it) so that its awareness and content are easily spread through social mediums and online communities by users and visitors of the website. This can include anything done “on-page” such as improving the design and usability of the website so that it becomes more compelling to users, in an effort to help them spread it through social media sites. The simplest example of SMO is represented by all the “digg this” and “add to delicious” icons and links that are all over the web today.

SMM on the other hand plays more of an active role in relation to social media by referring to the creation and distribution of content and other messages through the social web by some form of viral marketing. This can be anything from creating compelling content that gets bookmarked and even hits digg’s homepage to spreading a viral video by putting it on YouTube and other social media websites. It’s about the things that are done off-site, for example, participating in online communities where your customers hang out would be an active role that falls under SMM.

The clear difference between the two is that SMO refers to on-page modifications (on your website) while SMM refers to activities that take place outside of your website (on other websites). As I see it, SMO can be one of the ways to encourage SMM activities by users and visitors of your website

The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

In other words, many who do search engine optimization have learned to build search engine friendly sites. Do that and the search engines often will naturally reward you with traffic? But is your site social media friendly? Have you added the things that will get you into the new fertile ground of SMO?

It’s worth considering. Conceptually, some of this stuff isn’t new. For example, we long had people taking about ways to help others bookmark your web site. But today’s new wave of social media sites can operate as a magnifying glass. Get that one person to bookmark you to del.icio.us and in turn you might tap into many other links. And those links, of course, flow back into helping with search rankings.

There has been a lot been written about including the social aspect in your marketing strategy. While it may not seem a worthy endeavor, there is something to think about.

For more information visit our website

www.seohelpline.us