SMM (Social Media Marketing) is internet marketing that focuses heavily on marketing communication, branding and interaction with your targeted market. Social Media Marketing is a two-way communication channel rather than a one way broadcasting of your marketing message as in traditional marketing such as newspapers, TV advertisements, radio, etc.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) involves the marketing on Web 2.0 channels such as blogs, micro blogs, forums, social networks, social bookmarking sites, wiki’s, rss (real simple syndication) and others to name but a few. These Web 2.0 channels includes popular sites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, LinkedIn, Delicious, Reddit, myScoop (blog aggregator), Afrigator (blog aggregator) and Technorati (blog aggregator).

Use multiple Web 2.0 channels

A successful SMM campaign makes use of multiple Web 2.0 channels and venues and multiple media types. These media types includes content, audio and video. The goal with Social Media Marketing is to engage and interact in many places and in many ways. SMM gives users the chance to ask questions, talk, share information and opinions. network, learn, vote, bookmark, give feedback and other social media activities around a specific topic.

Social Media Marketing is really not about direct selling, marketing and direct promotion. It is all about building lasting relationships. This can often take time but the time you have invested in SMM can outweigh any of the costs involved.

Social Media Marketing can be used to:

Create a buzz

You can use videos (YouTube, Vimeo), blogs and micro blogging tools such as Twitter to attract attention and give attention to products, services or important events. The key to creating a buzz is to not make it interesting and fun – never about direct sales.

Build a following

Use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other social networking channel to build a loyal fan base that you can reach out to. You can build quite a big list by regular blogging on your blog.

Use forums, social networking and blogs. Conversation and interaction is at the heart of SMM. Remember – conversation is king in social media but in order to start the conversation, good quality content is needed.

SMM is not advertising. It is also not fully controlled by the organization. It strives to engage, interact and encourage participation. It is a solid online marketing campaign not built on control, but on respect and honesty. It’s about building relationships and about people getting to know you.

Even though SMM has been around for a while now, it’s never to late to learn more about it and start implementing social media campaigns into your current marketing strategy to increase your visibility online.