Social Media – the Key to Internet Marketing Success
Social Media – the Key to Internet Marketing Success
These days, just about everyone can be found on social media sites like MySpace, YouTube and FaceBook. These sites got their start as a keep-in-touch device for individuals, and for building a network of friends talking about their personal lives. However, since professional lives are so intimately connected to personal lives, these sites have now morphed into effective marketing media. It works like the old word-of-mouth advertising brought into the digital age.
For the professional community there are sites like LinkedIn and Plaxo, and those are often used for job searches. However, since so many have become discouraged job seekers and are starting their own businesses, these sites can also become effective for promoting ones website. In all cases, social media should not be used for in-your-face advertising, but for building trust among ones circle by providing valuable information.
Today there are over 400 social media sites, and to explore them and participate in all would take a lifetime. Many of them do not generate sufficient traffic to be useful and may be here today and gone tomorrow. The following link discusses the top 50 traffic-generating sites, some of them quite specialized to a specific audience: http://www.doshdosh.com/list-of-social-media-news-websites/. Check them out, and if you find one that is followed by your target market, go ahead and create an account. Start slowly by just observing for a while before you post blogs and articles. What you post must have strong content value to establish you as an expert in your field. In most cases you will be able to post your website link along with your author information, and readers who want to know more about your offerings will click on that link.
Make sure your messages are on target and relevant to your audience so that you do not get zapped as a spammer. Quite a few entrepreneurs report success with Twitter, but because you are so limited in message length, it’s difficult to comprehend using this medium for business purposes. Just observe for a while what’s going on and who is doing what before you commit half your days to tweeting. Once your business takes off, you’ll have less and less time for using social media, but you can always get a professional writer to do your blogging and article posting for you.
Social Media – the Key to Internet Marketing Success by CHERRY GOODKEY
