Social marketing nowadays is the best campaign to do if a webmaster targets quality traffic to his site. Results in doing this type of marketing campaign is quite impressive since traffic going to your site have a higher conversion rate of having more clients for business. Actually, visitors do have relevant interest with the nature of your business and have been in the same group or network in social sites where you are also a member.
Though the marketing campaign is tedious and requires a lot of time and effort to build your social network with the same relevance of your online business to meet that goal or target. It needs a lot of planning, time table and a list of sites to establish your pool of network and online credibility.
Though the marketing campaign is tedious and requires a lot of time and effort to build your social network with the same relevance of your online business to meet that goal or target. It needs a lot of planning, time table and a list of sites to establish your pool of network and online credibility.
The first question is: Where do I start?
Social marketing covers a wide range of websites with different classifications of being "social" online. If we are to categorize these sites, then it provides us the following terms and websites per category:
Social Sites
As of June, 2009 the top social sites are the following:
Ning - currently has more than 1 million social networks created and increasing. A site where you can create your own private social network, add friends, share relevant topics that interests your entire network and many more. This site is the leader amongst the leaders in the wide web world.
Bebo - this site has a total website population of 168 million and that is in the US alone. The site has innovative things such as explore the hottest bands but most important feature is that it is a one-stop-shop for Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Delicious, Twitter and Emails. What else can you say?!
Facebook (US) - one of the fastest growing social site in the web today with so many features. Last March, it has generated 55.9 million of web traffic for this News Corp owned social networking site and has surpassed MySpace who went down in traffic statistics in that period.
Other social sites that were in the forefront and still in the limelight are LinkedIn, Friendster (Asia), Hi5 (Europe), Vois (Europe) to name a few.
Other social sites that were in the forefront and still in the limelight are LinkedIn, Friendster (Asia), Hi5 (Europe), Vois (Europe) to name a few.
Social Bookmarking Sites
Del.icio.us - is the top bookmarking site since it was bought by Yahoo and widely used in the web. Other top leading social bookmarking sites are Digg, Reddit, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Diigo, and Mixx and these are not in the top order.
Forums
Most forums do have a top listings of their own depending on what type of communities or business niche you are interested in. There are even local and international forums that may interest you. Forum sites are commonly the best way to increase your personal or business network. But these sites do have small networks and postings are strictly monitored by Forum Administrators. A sample forum is DigitalPoint.
Other Social Networking Sites
- Business to Business Networls [B2B Networks [Alibaba]
- Video [Youtube]
- Music [Imeem]
- Groups [Google Groups, Windows Live, Yahoo Groups]
- Affiliate [Clickbank]
From these sites, there are free and paid memberships. But the famous ones are normally free. Paid memberships are mostly businesses that have existed physically and makes online promotion as one of their marketing tool.
If you are a rookie or a novice in social marketing and lack funds to invest for online promotion, then the best option is to always go for free memberships and go for sites with high Google page ranking that accepts website links included in your ad postings. The only difference between paid and free promotion is the time element of achieving your goal or targets. But if you know the techniques of searching for the right resource of websites offering free link posting that has a webpage equal to the Google PR of the paid website then you are in the right track and the best thing here is that you can maximize these free resources without spending that much.
The key investment needed here is LOTS of TIME and DILIGENCE to achieve your marketing target.
The best way to do this is to use those keywords from the META tags in your homepage to find them. In the web world, there are no boundaries and resources are limitless. Being an online marketing consultant for more than 5 years, I guess I am in the right position just to motivate you. The website population in the year 2000 has tremendously increased comparing it now (2009 statistics).
Basically, when you start your social marketing campaigns, the important factor to focus on is that the web community has no difference with what you do in reality. Your site represents you in the virtual world. So, proper HUMAN attitude must always be practiced with all your interactions (email etiquette, following rules & agreements in every site) to get positive reviews and gain online credibility. The common alibi of spammers and scam practitioners is that they cannot be caught or it is impossible to meet their victims online in the real world. That way of thinking, my friend, is their big mistake. With lots of new technologies and high-tech programs in the market can bring you to jail in less than a day and be misery the rest of your virtual and real life. :-)
In summary before you go to your next blog or site, social marketing is like a "word by mouth" technique compared to reality. Proper attitude, patience and time investment will provide you good result and online credibility. In the end, your own customer base network has grown without you realizing it. That's when the blessings come in your real world!
If you are a rookie or a novice in social marketing and lack funds to invest for online promotion, then the best option is to always go for free memberships and go for sites with high Google page ranking that accepts website links included in your ad postings. The only difference between paid and free promotion is the time element of achieving your goal or targets. But if you know the techniques of searching for the right resource of websites offering free link posting that has a webpage equal to the Google PR of the paid website then you are in the right track and the best thing here is that you can maximize these free resources without spending that much.
The key investment needed here is LOTS of TIME and DILIGENCE to achieve your marketing target.
The best way to do this is to use those keywords from the META tags in your homepage to find them. In the web world, there are no boundaries and resources are limitless. Being an online marketing consultant for more than 5 years, I guess I am in the right position just to motivate you. The website population in the year 2000 has tremendously increased comparing it now (2009 statistics).
Basically, when you start your social marketing campaigns, the important factor to focus on is that the web community has no difference with what you do in reality. Your site represents you in the virtual world. So, proper HUMAN attitude must always be practiced with all your interactions (email etiquette, following rules & agreements in every site) to get positive reviews and gain online credibility. The common alibi of spammers and scam practitioners is that they cannot be caught or it is impossible to meet their victims online in the real world. That way of thinking, my friend, is their big mistake. With lots of new technologies and high-tech programs in the market can bring you to jail in less than a day and be misery the rest of your virtual and real life. :-)
In summary before you go to your next blog or site, social marketing is like a "word by mouth" technique compared to reality. Proper attitude, patience and time investment will provide you good result and online credibility. In the end, your own customer base network has grown without you realizing it. That's when the blessings come in your real world!
