What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal and business.
Why Social Media Marketing?
1. To reach a global client or audience.
2. Accessibility: The ability to easily attain information and distribution of said information.
3. Usability: Easy to use, unlike writing a newspaper article or a thesis paper, you only need to know the product you have, you don't have to be an expert just be able to relay information. It doesnt require any degrees or relevant skills other than reading and writing.
4. Time: The ability to write a description of an item or idea and relay it to many people in different times, once the information is on, it remains until you delete it.
5. Permanence: With social media you can update, keep relevant and add new content whenever you need to.
6. Price: You don't have to pay to do Social Media Marketing, just your time.
Who should be using Social Media Marketing?
Anyone who has a business should be using Social Media Marketing, but it is not limited to just business owners, non profit organizations can use this technique to get information out to large groups with limited to no funds needed. Anyone who has information to relate to a large audience in a quick manner can and should use Social Media Marketing to advance their cause.
Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, wikis, pod-casts, pictures and video. Some most commonly used are: Ning, Multiply, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Plurk, Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, Ecrater Forums, Flickr and Photobucket; just to name a few. How or why you use the technology is up to you.
An important things to remember: While Social Media Marketing is probably the easiest way to find and communicate with customers, having out-dated or dead sites, or sites you don't frequent and keep fresh and viable, makes you and your business look uninviting. It imparts the feeling that you don't care, that you are lazy, a goof-off, and I don't know about you but I don't want that stigma on my site or business. So think things through before you join all these sites that you don't have time to go to on a day to day basis. A little planning goes a long way.