What is Social Marketing?

With the advent of Web 2.0 (interactive, dynamic websites that promote or operate as social networks), people can now easily find information and websites that other people recommend rather than having to rely solely on the search engines in order to find information online. 

Websites like Facebook, Del.icio.us, Digg, and Furl allow users to share their personal favourites (bookmarks) with others. Users tag each bookmarked website with the keywords they feel are most applicable.

Now, instead of using a search engine to find information, people can search tags that will display all websites bookmarked with that specific tag. This acts as a human referral or vote for the site and its relevance to the topic being searched.

Other versions of social networking include blogging social networks – primarily Technorati.com.

Technorati indexes blogs based on the amount of incoming links those blogs have, as well as the tags associated with their blog posts.

But the most popular social network at the time of writing (March 2008) is MySpace. Though the social giant enjoys over 20 million unique visitors every month, until recently few businesses or website owners have thought to take advantage of this incredible resource.

Bradley Hororwitz, Yahoo's Director of Technology said …
 

"It's no longer a question of whether social networking is important, it's a question of how do we leverage this phenomenon."

And, all you have to do is look at the activities online among business owners to see that slowly, people are no longer seeing social networking as a fad for college kids.  Social Networking has now become a serious business tool which has enabled many companies to achieve higher search engine listings that they never would have achieved with search engine optimization strategies alone.

YouTube and iTunes have revolutionized audio and video marketing and in just a few simple steps you could be broadcasting your audio and videos to a broad spectrum of watchers and listeners who "viralize" your efforts by passing on the links to their friends or, adding your content to their website or blog.
 

How Will Social Networking Help My Site Traffic Grow?

Two out of three people online in June 2006 visited a social networking site. In fact, 1 out of every 20 website visits is to a social networking website. Experts say that social networks are starting to eclipse traffic from the major search engines Yahoo! and Google.

So if your company is not present on any of the major social networks, you're missing out on the easiest, fastest way to access 67% of internet users possibly looking for the product or service you provide.
 

How Do I Get Involved in Social Networking?

Working with social sites is similar to working with the media. Give them a good enough story, secret, tip, or resource that they can sink their teeth into and you’ll have an army of talkers spreading the word about you and your business.

And this talking and buzzing as it were, translates into referrals, which convert into sales on an average of 667% better than cold leads from search engine results.  So this means that even if you reach less people through social networking, your conversions will be far higher.

You can target various social networks through a variety of methods:

Article or Blog Promotion

If you sell pet beds, gifts, and items, for example, by developing a series of blog posts or articles that discuss either a controversial or “hot off the press” topic that pet lovers either find highly valuable as an information resource, or highly intriguing or emotionally stimulating, it is more likely to be passed on.  By promoting the article to various social bookmarking and blogging networks, as well as popular bloggers you will generate traffic back to your website.

Social Promotion

One trap that you don't want to fall into if you are new to social networking is to try and implement a social promotion campaigns on every network.  You have to decide who your audience is and then decide on a social marketing strategy.  So, you may decide to actively network on MySpace, FaceBook, Furl, and StumbleUpon to spread the word about your business. The aim of social marketing though is always to devise a creative campaign to get the net buzzing about your business.

How Does Social Networking Work With SEO?

As more and more internet users begin to use tags to find information (a tag is a keyword that a person associated with a website, vs. a keyword that a search engine attributes to a website), it will just become harder for anyone doing business online to ignore the growing dominance of the social networks.

However, in my view, the partnership between social networks and search engines are an excellent and balanced marriage. Sure, social networking gets you in front of people who no longer use search engines in lieu of finding information through referrals or bookmarks/tags.

But the added, and perhaps more exciting bonus, is that while you grow in popularity with social networks like Facebook, Digg and MySpace, your search rankings will continue to increase as a result!

Your popularity signals Google that you are an authority in your market according to your human audience and in return, the search engines will credit you for this popularity.

So as you can see, combining social networking or as it is increasingly becoming known among business users, social marketing, with search engine strategies really is a win, win situation and will increase your online presence faster than utilizing one strategy alone.