Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Social Media Marketing

The latest wave of marketing on the Internet is called "Social Media" or "Viral Marketing". It has sprung up out of nowhere and millions of people have latched onto it because it is much more personal and can have extremely wide reaching results. It is spreading like wildfire and fast becoming one of those "have to" items to succeed on the net. The idea of this form of internet marketing is to become "friends" with hundreds and thousands of people across the world.

Here's a list of some of the more popular Social Media sites: FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo, Orkut (run by Google), Google Groups, Digg (social news), YouTube (video sharing), Flickr (photos sharing), and Yelp (product reviews).

There are many websites that offer this type of service and almost all of them are completely free to sign up. Some of them are generalized about any topic you wish, while others are focused on a specific type of group or genre. We can help you decide which will most effectively meet your needs.

We have found that our clients are a bit reluctant to jump into it themselves, so we now offering help in setting up and maintaining these accounts to maximize your marketing potential. We are focusing on what we call the "top 3" social media sites, but we are also available to help with setting up other accounts.

Go to http://www.reliablewebdesigns.com/5Steps/InternetMarketing/social-media.htm to read up on how we can help you with FaceBook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.



Additional Thoughts about Social Media

With all of the above "Social Media" sites, we strongly recommend that you post your own content. You are your best representative, and thus will know what to post and what to respond when others ask questions or post comments. Some of our clients have expressed reservations about the time it will take to do this, but we wish to express to you that you can post as much or as little as you wish. There are no deadlines or rules to how much you must post. As with anything, the more involved you are the more successful it tends to be... Never feel pressured by having to post information. One posting a month with good content is far more effective than daily postings that don't say anything and become junk to the reader.

It is our goal to help you get started into the world of "Social Media" so that you have true success marketing yourself in this new universe.