Let your customers do the promoting.

You’ve probably all hear of Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube. Social media marketing is now an established form of marketing, and is a dominant form of marketing in our electronic world.

How does social media marketing and search engine marketing differ?

Social media marketing in action. Note how certain social channel viewers can 'follow' you through RSS.

So what’s all the buzz? Why is social media marketing so important? Social media marketing (let’s call it SMM) is different from search engine marketing (SEM) because it allows others to comment and evaluate you to their friends, business associates, and peers – really anyone they know or connect to.

How do you use social media marketing?

By joining various social sites, you have the opportunity to connect with others that share similar interests as you, like

• Friends of ages past, or current friends, whether you’ve ever met them or not
• Family members, extended family networks
• Business associates of your company or other companies
• Special interest groups – whether hobbyists, causes, real neighborhoods, food, etc.

By linking to others, or commenting upon a particular article, idea, or piece of media (“that video was funny!”) you are creating social bonds, regardless of how ‘weak tie’ it is.

Why it’s so important for business.

Most people think of social networks as more ‘personal’ and hobby-related. Not so. SMM is becoming a dominant force in marketing. Since businesses can now create groups of ‘fans’ or ‘followers’, they can promote through those channels. Very real information that could help consumers out there can be pushed. If the person likes what they’re reading, they can ‘thumbs up’ it, syndicate it to their friends/associates, and the cycle begins again.

SMM is in essence a way for ‘knowledge cream’ to rise to the top of various channels, and the authorities of those channels get business.

What social media marketing is used for.

• Helps you get noticed: Broadcast your marketing message. Through ‘real simply syndication you can ‘be everywhere your customer is’, like social sites and authority sites. Plus, RSS allows customers to ’subscribe’ to you, thereby being alerted to new content when available directly.
• Helps you drive traffic: Distinguish yourself, favorably. Building brand is important overall, but on social media sites, there is the additional advantage of grabbing favorable product/service testimonials. When you have a brand that elicits and emotional response, then traffic will flow. By the way, why didn’t we select social media marketing overall as a tactic? Because there is so much chaff out there, you must be the wheat by branding and
• Helps make your website sticky: RSS: Allow others to subscribe and syndicate your content. That gets the word out there, draws more traffic, and allows visitors to find you more easily to return to your website. Branding: A clear and intuitive theme should run through your website, including coloration, logo design. Basically, your ‘look and feel’ should remain consistent and match your logo in some way.
• Helps you build trust: RSS: Broadcast and retrieval power builds trust. Make it easy for people to come back to your website, shout out to the world that you’re an authority. RSS does this. Branding: Brand is trust. Branding yourself (then creating great content) is powerful, since all content built can be be referred to your brand and therefore you. Also, building and prominently displaying testimonials directly onto your website is a convincing argument to giving you a try. Once even one purchase is made, quality and customer services takes over.
• Helps you stay in touch: Allow your customer to choose their commitment level. RSS has made it easy to keep in touch with your favorite writers, merchants, gurus. Without using RSS, you won’t attract a significant portion of consumers or readers. What’s more, RSS, if setup correctly, allows customers to select the level of ‘following’ they do of you. Do they want to know of every product you introduce, a particular produce line, or only Product X? RSS also allows far more efficient viral marketing, they ability for customers to tell other customers where and how good you are. This will be talked about more in Building Referrals, the 7th step successful websites must take.
• Helps you generate sales / leads: RSS Notifications are a godsend. You can tie RSS to a particular product, and then that product goes on sale, you customer can be alerted via email or RSS aggregator.
• Helps you build referrals: RSS: Multiply word of mouth power by a factor of 10. RSS allows you to keep in touch with interested parties, whom are more likely to refer. SMM overall: Syndication is visibility. RSS syndication acts as free affiliate marketing (if your articles are worthy

Final word.

Without social media marketing, you’re missing half the Internet marketing puzzle. SEM is no longer enough; you must become social!