Social Media Marketing For Beginners

Starting a business or building an existing business can be a difficult task. The one thing that is most important to becoming successful is advertising. A method of marketing that uses tools like email, word of mouth, niche marketing and viral marketing to increase web presence for the product or service being advertised.

Social Media Marketing also known as SMM is the use of a social network as an advertising tool to promote your product or service. By using online communities, blogs, wikis or other interactive internet media for marketing it is possible to reach a lot of people without spending a lot of money.

Many of us are so excited about the technology and web (hence my somewhat trite opening), that we forget key pieces to success: definition of business goals, objectives and overall process for execution. The old "fail to plan, plan to fail" comes to mind. While you need to create the road map for your online business - you must certainly decide on what goals and resulting metrics you want to attain.

Social media marketing can help you increase the activity around these top goals:

· Website traffic and user behavior (external and internal tracking)

· Conversion and sales tracking

· Page views, ad exposure

· Growing brand awareness (a softer value, takes longer to build)

· Creating a positive brand association and keeping it there (see also reputation management)

· Business development and a broader customer reach

SMM is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels and it is a powerful strategy that will get you links, attention and massive amounts of traffic. If you are selling products/services or just publishing content for ad revenue, social media marketing is a potential method that will make your site profitable over time.

Using social media marketing is free and can increase your traffic and your ratings in the search engines. Getting your site noticed a couple times a year in the social media arena can make your site popular enough to bring in traffic throughout the year.

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