Social media depicts the online skills and techniques that everyone uses to provide outlooks, viewpoints, ideas, perceptions, information, entertainment, etc. These skills may be portrayed through technologies like blog messages, scraps, videos, podcasts, web pages, wikis, communication boards, etc. The freely accessible worldwide encyclopedia for reference (Wikipedia), social networking websites (Orkut, Myspace), business networking (ryze.com), video sharing sites (YouTube), etc are various mediums of social media.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) uses web marketing techniques for achieving brand marketing and awareness. It blends branding tricks through the social media. The branding and advertising needs and trends may be different for different organisations. While one tries to generate brand awareness, another may be looking for product visibility or market penetration. It may also take the form of online brand image management. The marketing strategy here is unlike the traditional hard selling techniques. Social media marketing requires tactful marketing of a particular product or service in a particular community or group to achieve maximum referrals. Identifying the target audience and adopting marketing strategies targeted at them, is the right way. It all starts with selection of the right medium and using it resourcefully to appeal to the target audience. A blend of information, leisure, hilarity, debate can do the trick.

Social media marketing is much like: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Word-of-Mouth Marketing, and Social Media Optimization (SMO). Many people consider that SMO applies the principles of SEO to social media websites. SMM takes a more vigorously premeditated role hinting at the community to unite with the content.

Social Media Marketing - Steps

- Build web pages that supply links reversely, to the website owned by you.
- Use keyword rich content on the pages that can be optimized.
- Make accounts or profiles on popular sites (Orkut, Ryze.com) to market yourself.
- Help social media websites add a degree of value and brand image through your contributions.

Do’s and Don’ts and tricks for SMM

- Asking a friend to put forward a story about you on your own website can catapult credibility. This is an important promotional tool with promising returns. People recognize your credibility through the notions of others.
- Preconceived notions and opinions are unwelcome and therefore avoid putting them up in any form.
- Buying votes is a big no. This method doesn’t work always. It is just your credibility that you have in these types of communities.
- Take active participation in the community and gain a unique recognition.
- Be an active follower of community’s rules and regulations and avoid breaking the rules in any form.
- Don’t flood the website or community messages with inappropriate content or spam messages.
- Try creating a brand image by leading people and creating your own communities if possible.
- Be of some help to people. This will give you recognition make them come to you again.
- Make more friends and be magnanimous. People will further introduce their friends to you.
- Post important articles and interesting information that can catch attention immediately.
- Reward users that contribute to your website and develop a name.
- Ensure that your server is not low. People logging in first time may be diverted due to it.

Social Media Marketing Strategies

Boost your linkability – There is a constant need to update information on a website in order to increase referrals and business. You must provide important and content rich links preferably to a blogs or a profile page. This can be very helpful and can generate huge traffic every given day. You can also create links leading to white papers or interesting articles, thoughts, poems, or any other eye grabbing content.

Reward inbound links – Inbound links can dominate search engine rankings and boost traffic. Creating inbound links to your blogs or websites is the key technique. This can be done by listing interesting or new blogs to your web pages and increase their visibility in no time.

Make your content go places – Through portable videos, PDF files, images, audio files, etc. you can make your content travel far and wide to various people and places and provide a link there to help them reach back to your website. This can be done on YouTube or even on Tagged.com, etc. This will help you to penetrate faster in the market and reach wide customers.

Allow free sharing and access - Allow people to access your content freely and share it with others too. You can use animation and flashes on your website and make the website user friendly too. YouTube is a prominent example of this. Also provide features like creating your own videos, slideshows, images and a whole lot of other interesting features. This can enhance the growth of your website and also increase your networking among people. People will further recommend it to others. Thus you need to support mashup.

Popular sites to market yourself

Digg | Orkut | Ryze | MySpace| Del.icio.us | Wikipedia | Flickr | Yahoo! Answers |Yahoo! 360 | Secondlife

Benefits of SMM

1. The traffic and referrals to a website increase in two fold and these websites come up from time to time in various newspapers and publications as change agents and boons to the society. This also leads to an increased user login and advertising capacity.

2. The links provided by you can help you market yourself and your organisation and increase your brand image.

3. By creating your profile you can develop a name and a certain brand value.

4. Active participation in communities and posts can be a source of additional income through brand awareness.

5. You can also pick up advertisers if your website has a huge traffic and can earn in the form of commissions.

6. There is a huge potential for websites including user friendly features like video sharing, image and slideshow sharing, blog making, etc as these interest people of all ages and generate huge views and traffic on your website. If the server is not low there may be many more people logging in to your website.