Social media marketing: leverage in online business

Nowadays, social media marketing equates to leverage in this digital age. Nonetheless,it borrows concepts from traditional marketing. In traditional marketing, marketing communications is crucial in delivering effective messages to the audience as well as maintaining a good image. The known components of the promotional mix like public relations, direct marketing, advertising, personal selling, and other elements establish messages that customers need to understand. Briefly, marketing communications is the candy wrapper to a product. Beforehand,using any one of those elements were expensive since most companies outsource the planning until the production of such services to third party like media relations firms and ad agencies. It's a good thing though that the landscape of social media marketing has greatly changed since web 2.0 technologies emerged. Nonetheless, there are also some adjustments that has to be done when conducting social media marketing.

The term social media marketing is also known as social media optimization or SMO.SMO helps site owners to create and establish networks, maintain relationships with customers and help their business grow naturally by word of mouth. Most popular platforms normally known by people are Facebook, YouTube,LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace and Digg. There are numerous possible platforms like blogs, social networking sites, forums and web communities one can get into.

Social media marketing actually uses a different distribution channel for goods and services- the Internet. Similarly,it is the same vehicle used for social media marketing and in this case, links and huge traffic is the real edge in competitiveness. For beginners, traffic is driving people to your site or blog. The more natural the traffic, the rankings of your site would increase and have enhanced standing in reputation aggregators like Yahoo, Google, Ask Jeeves and other browsers. More often than not, social media marketing is really costly but they are all worth it as long as you get to drive large traffic to your site. Building links by contributing articles to reputable websites can also do wonders for your website. People who read your content can link back and that helps a lot in enhancing your ranking. Because of this, online business owners should devote attentiona nd resources to social media marketing.