Social Marketing Media (SMM) is an incredibly effective way to create a buzz for your website. It is the most popular upcoming ‘buzzwords’ in the Internet Marketing industry. You can get lots of targeted quality traffic to your website without depending entirely on SERP‘s. A creative SMM strategy allows you interact with your audience so you learn more about their wants and needs. It combines the goals of internet marketing with social media sites such as Digg, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube and many … It is related to other online marketing such as Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Viral Marketing, Word of Mouth Marketing and Social Media Optimization.
It plays more of an active role in relation to social media by referring to the creation and distribution of content and other messages through the social web by some form of viral marketing. This can be anything from creating compelling content that gets bookmarked and even hits digg’s homepage to spreading a viral video by putting it on YouTube and other social media websites. It’s about the things that are done off-site, for example, participating in online communities where your customers hang out would be an active role that falls under SMM
Profit By Search follow the following rules for SMM to create buzz for your website:
- Increase your Linkability. Static sites are a thing of the past, especially in terms of popularity. One of the best ways to have a voice online and be able to update your site daily is to have a blog. This allows you to have an RSS feed where people can catch up on your latest content.
- Make Tagging & Bookmarking Easy. This means have your website setup so that it is easier for people to link to you. Such things can include buttons for submitting your site to Digg or tagging your site at Del.icio.us.
- Reward Inbound links. This can be done by linking back to the people who link to you, visit their site and leave comments on their blog or generally help promote their site socially.
- Help your Content travel. This is basically allowing your content that isnt’ specifically text spread around the web. Podcasts can be added to podcast directories while Video’s can be submitted to the likes of Youtube and Metacafe.
- Encourage the mashup. Youtube’s success relied a lot on people being able to embed their videos elsewhere. Allow your content to be used elsewhere, a good example of this can be to ensure your updating content has an RSS feed.
- Be a User Resource. This means having quality content on your site and being a place that people can come back to for the best content on a particular niche. This is also advised even if producing the content doesn’t necessarily help you in terms of financial gain or even if it means linking out to your competitors.
- Reward Users. If people are being active on your website submitting your content to places or leaving comments then reward them. Run a competition or just email them to show your appreciation. They will like the fact you recognise them and like what they are doing.
- Participate. The best way to understand the enjoyment users get from being social on some of the top websites is to get in there and do it yourself. Not only that but comment on the blogs you read in your niche and encourage discussion on relevant forums and communities.
- Know how to Target your Audience. Make sure you know who you are marketing. It would obviously be great to have everyone using your…mortagage calculator tool but you have to be realistic in terms of the chances of that happening.
- Create Content. Not just any content, but content that is remarkable or unique, content that can easily spread. No matter what industry you are in there is something unique you can create, whether it will spread or not is another matter but you have to create it to try.
- Be Real. Don’t try and be something your not, don’t try and claim you do something you don’t. Transparency is accepted and respected, blatent marketing where it isn’t wanted is only bad for your name and the name of your company.
- Choose your Tactics Wisely. 1% of people in Social Media are creating content, 9% will enrich the content and 90% of people are consuming the content, that is a lot of leverage. Work out what tactics have given the best outcome and work to re-produce those efficiently.