Social Media

  Internet has made simple to access and distribute the published content. Social Media Marketing is a recent component of the Integrated Marketing Communications(IMC) plans, using online comunities. It focuses in creating content that attracts attention and stimulates readers to share it over their social network connections. Social Media Marketing facilitates the communication with the custοmers, increasing so the exposure and brand awareness. It helps the marketing campaigns implementation.

Aggregating and Bookmarking. Submitting your content on aggregating or bookmarking services is crucial for passing the messages around. It is an excellent tool for organizations to mark out relevant articles and websites. Contents submitted in aggregating or bookmarking sites can drive tremendous traffic into websites exposing it to larger targeted public. On these sites you can find you competitors, get to know them, and maybe sources for new ideas. You may know what your targeted public likes to vote for, and enhance that content. It is a good place to find out the way you are percieved by your audience. On the Internet you can find different sites that offer bookmarking or aggregating services varying according to their policies on content access, aggregation and visualisation.
Delicious(www.del.icio.us) is one of the most popular social bookmarking services. It allows you to store your bookmarks online and grants to access other people's bookmarks as well. It has blog posting feature, used to display bookmarks on weblogs.
Aggregating sites like www.multi.co.za, www.reddit.com and www.digg.com are popularity-based, users can submit and vote contents. The contents are usually presented sorted by theirs popularity. They have large traffic from users that are looking for "hot" topics. Another example is Technorati which acts also like a search engine, blog search engine, but  basicaly it is a tag-bases index. Here you can see marketing trends and also monitor online reputation.

Creating and sharing. When talking about  content, it refers to different kinds of it: information, video, images, audio files. People like to create contents and share it with others. These sites have gained popularity  because of their free services, on YouTube any subscribed user can upload unlimited number of videos having  free key words for it, comment, add video responses, subscribe for RSS feed. YouTube encourages video sharing by the embed video  feature that  will add the video on the desired websites.  With multiple options, and yet simple to use, YouTube has about 60% of all online video viewers. YouTube helps self-promoting via video-advertisements and also sponsored advers that is supported by Google AdWords. Any savvy marketer realises the potential of watching the organic comments on their brand, and then capitalising on this. Big companies also are  taking advantage of YouTube video sharing, by uploading video conferences, opening this way the doors to a larger audience.
Another powerful free website is Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia (biggest on the web) created by volunteers around the world. Companies should make transparent efforts regarding the information about them on Wikipaedia. Wikis  are usually used  when creating an event with a network, providing means for communication and greater connection.

Social Networks. Being free for their members, social networks get revenues from advertising. Personal profiles reveal much from the anonymity of the Internet, dealing with demographic information like gender, age, location, favorites, etc, that favours the advertisers to target their adverts to a particular audience. Generate exposure and let your messages spread viraly across the social networks.

Blogging. Blogs are powerful tools that gave a voice to the audience. It turned to be an information sharing possibility between the companies and their customers. Blogs with relevant fresh content improve the SEO of your website as well as the  page ranking.  There are some guidelines that help to create search engine friendly blogs: - every post should have an easy accessable permanent link and unique metadata (title, description), - pages  should be tagged with key words(relevant for SEO strategy), they are crucial  to harnessing the SEO power of blogging. There are different kinds of blogging: corporate blogging,  promoting blogs, microblogging, varying from each other in the content revealed, goals, writting volume, instancy. For marketers they are opportunities to learn your audience and to get engaged with it. Blogs are not about creating articles and then promoting them on social sites as an afterthought. It’s about putting social media in the center of your marketing strategy, optimizing your site or content and making it an attention center.

Social Media Benefits

Social Media benefits considerably the SEO of the websites, especially when engaging in more different media. It enhances page ranks when sharing and creating content. In helps in creating platform for Viral Marketing campaigns, it influents online reputation management, and Web PR. Uses the communication tools of the connected audience and creates  foundations for online reputation management (ORM), it creates an online oportunity for your brand and its supporters. Social Media provides feedback wich helps driving internet marketing strategies. There is no other low-cost promotional tactic that will easily give large amount of visitors.