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Social media marketing is a new aspect of internet marketing. With social media marketing you can advertise and communicate on social media sites as Facebook, Twitter and LinkdIn, where users exchange information with other users. Social media marketing is common among private individuals, businesses, government organizations and non-profit organizations.

Social media marketing (SMM) has a number of roles. Social media activity strengthens the bond between brand and its customers by exposing it to potential target audience and by online reputation management (ORM).

Social networks can contribute to search engine optimization (SEO) and the site’s ranking in relevant search results. In order to support the Social Media Optimization (SMO), one must manage the brand’s profile and pages on social networks in an effective and search engine friendly way.

Social Networks
The internet refers to many social networks: international and with a wide variety of target audience like Facebook and YouTube, and social networks for small niches such as cat lovers or tea drinkers.

Facebook, the social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 for Harvard students, has over 800 million registered users (for more information on the average Facebook user see Facebook Statistics).

Other popular social networks are:

Twitter – a social network that lets you deliver short, precise messages.

LinkedIn – for professional and business networking

YouTube – the largest video sharing community online

Google+ – the new social network preferred by Google’s search engine.

These social networks are used to promote websites on search engines, mainly because of their popularity and their appeal to a wide audience. In order to promote a website in social networks you do not have to register to all of them, but to carefully choose the best network for your brand, based on its character and features, its profile of users, the business or website you would like to promote and your target audience.

Social Media Optimization

Social Media Optimization (or Social SEO) is one of the most common uses of social websites, and its purpose is to increase the website’s traffic and its search rankings on search engines like Yahoo, Bing and Google. Social networks provide an easy platform to distribute content to target audience and promote the keywords and phrases we wish to rank in the top search results. Social networks also help building incoming links to a website.

Your Social Media Profile is Your Business Card

The profile page on social networks – info on Facebook, about on Google+ and User on YouTube – lets you display your business card (or you website’s) on the relevant niches or for the right social group (made from acquaintances, business partners, clients and potential clients). You should carefully choose the relevant categories and write an attractive and accurate description.

The profile page on most social networks enables you, in addition to introducing yourself, to add a link to your professional or business site. This link is meaningful both in generating traffic and to the search engines.

The “nofollow” attribute is common on social networks, user based content websites like Wikipedia and discussion groups when attached to outgoing links and it instructs search engines not to follow the attached link. The “nofollow” attribute is attached to links to protect the site from “spam” links, and stop search engines from promoting a website due to the number of links on social media and user based sites.

For instance, links attached on the profile page on Twitter and Facebook are “nofollow” that guides the search engines not to follow that link. On Google+, however, links on the profile page are “follow”.

In order to use your profile for social media marketing to its full potential one must optimize its content, both the visual and the textual content. That means that keywords must be used in titles, username (where applicable, not all site allow generic terms as usernames) and content that includes detailed descriptions of the site. Furthermore, the profile photo’s name must be changed to include relevant keywords and add a descriptive alt tag. These changes apply to all media uploaded to the profile (videos, pictures, etc) of the various social media platforms.

Social Media Activity

A social network, as the name implies, is based on social links and connections (on a larger scale than in the real world), and social media marketing demands constant activities on it. Frequent updates to the various social media profiles have a positive influence on both search engines and business partners (both current and potential), who will naturally show interest in a dynamic, updated page rather than in a static one.

Being active on social media lets you share and update your friends on every aspect of the website, whether it is a new blog post, a new homepage design or new admission hours. Social media lets you brand yourselves as an authority in your field by constant activity that includes sharing professional content (not only content that was written by you), new content that touches your niche, participating in relevant discussion groups and such. Building an image of an authority in you field can draw clients and new business partners as well as strengthen existing bonds.

Social media marketing is a relatively simple way to achieve focused exposure of a brand and help its internet marketing efforts. Social networks also have an important role in online reputation management. Social media marketing lets individuals or public organizations appear in wanted search results with descriptions written by them, as well as maintain relations with clients and business partners make new business contacts and keep them updated in the site’s content.