What is Social Media Marketing?

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With the birth of Web 2.0, many social media sites began popping up in the online world. This has created immense opportunities for businesses to build intimate relationships with their stakeholders.

Through marketing on social media platforms, businesses are able to drive massive traffic to their websites and generate quality sales leads. Most importantly, with people spending increasing amount of time on social media sites, where else could a company go to market itself?

It is obvious that social media marketing means marketing through the use of social media (duh!). However, in the mad rush to put their hands and feet in, companies missed out the essence of social media marketing.

Social Media Marketing is Word of Mouth

Media sharing sites, blogs, social bookmarks and social networks are all part of social media. Social media is powerful because it is extremely viral. Users can now effortlessly share anything they want with others. What’s more, people trust what fellow users share much more than what companies are desperately trying to tell them directly. Hence, for businesses that want to leverage on this, they must know how to make the spread easy and fast. By simply making their website user friendly and inter-linked with all other social media profiles, new product launches, news and brand presence could be passed on to millions, causing their website traffic to boom.

A great example would be the recent announcement on the launch of Google chrome OS. It was first introduced in Google’s blog and within a day, all social media sites were talking about it. There was news written on it, links that led people to it and people discussing the benefits of Microsoft’s rival OS. All Google had to do was to write a blog post on its new product. They knew that just one reader was enough to start the rapid spread of news across the social media world.

But of course we are not Google. Therefore, it is crucial for smaller businesses to learn how to use word of mouth to their advantage. They must be interesting enough to be referral worthy and not give people any excuses to stop the dissemination.

Social Media Marketing is Fun

To keep customers engaged, social media marketing has to be fun and subtle. Consequently, many companies started using fun stuff such as games and applications to promote their brands and products. Marketing messages can be incorporated into online games – branded drink machines and storefronts or billboards placed along the roads of racing games. Also, Facebook quizzes and applications can be developed to build brand awareness in an interesting way. Virtual worlds like Second Life and Twinity have become great product placement platforms. Companies with Fancl as an example, have created their own online games to more prominently promote their products.

Social Media Marketing is Creative

Online marketing is no longer restricted to static Pay Per Click advertisements. There are many ways to creatively market a product online. To interest customers, companies can freely advertise and hold promotions in the most unconventional ways.

Starbucks® for one has a strong presence on Facebook and it cleverly developed a Facebook application to promote its new Starbucks Ice Cream; rewarding Facebook users with free ice cream vouchers.

Social Media Marketing is Boundless

I am sure you are convinced by now that social media marketing is boundless. From simply building targeted followers to creating games and applications, businesses can be in constant contact with their customers, gain direct feedback and have customers spending more time interacting with their brand.

Accordingly, businesses that want to be part of the social media world must know these four important characteristics of successful social media marketing. It is not about setting up a page on Facebook and updating once in a while. Social media marketing has no restrictions and it’s most certainly not for the boring and unoriginal marketers.

Besides, this is only the start and it is indeed a pleasure to watch and wait for companies to bring social media marketing to the next level, making it more viral, creative and fun.