CORMARQ

Why Use Social Media?

April 1, 2009

One of the basic keys to building a successful internet business is driving traffic to your website or blog. Without traffic, your business simply does not exist online. It’s a common misconception that you can only get traffic from the search engines. While search engines usually will provide the bulk of your traffic, there are many other ways to drive traffic to your website other than thru the search engines.

One of the latest techniques for driving targeted traffic to your website is using what are called social media. Social media are websites and applications that specialize in sharing and discussing information among other interested people. The major social media include sites like myspace, facebook, technorati, stumbleupon, and digg to name just a few. If you are not utilizing any of these in your current marketing mix then you are missing out on a substantial volume of free, targeted traffic.

The first thing you should do before jumping into the social media marketing game is to explore some of the more prominent social media sites, learn their rules, and learn how they basically operate.

Here is a list of the major social media sites that everyone is talking about:

Youtube (video)

MySpace (social networking)

Facebook (social networking)

LinkedIn (social networking)

Digg (blogging)

Twitter (micro-blogging)

There are many other social media sites out there and new ones spring up all of the time. However, the sites listed above account for approximately 85% of social media traffic and therefore focusing your marketing efforts on these sites will likely be very effective.

Once you have taken the time to familiarize yourself with the above websites, the next thing you should do is read the spam policy of each site. The owners and users of the social media sites hate spam with a passion. Therefore, it’s very important to disguise your commercial intentions as meaningful content. Better yet, instead of disguising your intentions, actually submit relevent, quality content that users of social media will appreciate. If you do this you are likely to see a huge flow of traffic.

The bottom line is this: if you want the social media sites to work for you you need to work with them rather than against them. And this means providing users with meaningful content, not a bunch of bogus information and spam links.

http://mashable.com/2009/03/23/social-media-marketing-budgets/

Entry Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: branding, cost per impression, marketing.