Why Social Marketing?
 

At the rate at which the world wide web is changing, it is not surprising that internet marketers are going ‘social’ and recognizing the value of social networking sites like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Going by the statistics on the amounts of unimaginable traffic these sites are experiencing, what Internet marketer wouldn’t want a huge share of it? In order to be in the race, these social media sites are very important and must be leveraged in a way that makes sense to the specific online business. These sites not only play a vital role in search engine optimization but also for high search engine rankings and therefore, traffic.

How The Concept Works
 

One marketer talks about how his site turned up in the first page of Google’s search results for a particular key phrase even though the key phrase was not one of his targeted keywords. What had actually happened was one of his site’s visitors book marked that page on his site on Digg, which is a social bookmarking site. As a result of this, his website saw a massive rush of traffic. While this didn’t make a big difference in the sense of marketing, he soon realized how it made a difference to his search engine rankings – which means people do come to his website simply because his site still ranks at first place for that key phrase. So the moral of the story is, social media sites play a crucial role in search engine rankings and are not to be ignored.

Happily, social bookmarking brings direct traffic from websites that are ranked among the top five for traffic. Almost all Internet users would have had a brush with social media by signing up with say, MySpace or Facebook. But it is not enough to create a profile and let it collect dust. It can be an effective means to build an entire business successfully by leveraging these sites by going about it in a planned and strategic manner, as many well-written social bookmarking guides will tell you.

Social Media Tactics That Work
 

It is not hard to become involved with social bookmark sites. There are easy to install and use bookmark tools, which allow the user to add the bookmark button to their pages and content. When these pages and content are visited by traffic, they are book marked and links are built. Most Internet marketers use the simple tactic of joining all these social media sites as they are all free to sign up with – which means they sign up with MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Squidoo and the rest of it which are all part of the Web 2.0 platform. For the Internet marketer who wants to try social media marketing there are different methods depending on the kind of products and services offered and what outcome is expected. Here’s a quick overview of the ones that are the most popular vis-à-vis goals:

• Social bookmarking sites: like Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us where members can rate content
• Video sharing sites: the highest traffic numbers are at YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, etc. these sites allow uploading and sharing of one’s own videos as well as others’.
• Business networking sites: like Ryze, LinkedIn that allow a free personal web page as well as extra facilities with upgrade to paid memberships.
• Photo sharing sites: the most popular ones are Flickr, Webshots, Shutterfly which have huge member lists
• Social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace etc are good networking tools with plenty of groups within formed by like-minded people.

Social bookmarking works for any size of business through a few simple strategies. The main thing to be cautious about is following the rules at these websites in order to be successful.