Matt Levenhagen asked:

How do we define Social Marketing? It’s one of the most recent trends in Internet Marketing. If you aren’t familiar with Social Marketing, it is simply a way for online marketers to use social networking sites in order to find people who share their interests and who might be looking to find what they have to offer.

Social Marketing is also a great way for anyone who is unfamiliar with online networking to learn from others who have much more knowledge and experience.

The best way to use Social Marketing for business purposes is meeting other members with common interests, share what you have to offer without forcing your product on people and take advantage of how it can impact where you rank on the search engines for even more exposure on the Internet.

You have many, many choices if you want to start Social Marketing. The most popular social networking sites include MySpace.com and Facebook.com. There are also content-sharing social websites like Digg.com, Squidoo.com and Redditt.com. You can use these networking sites to share your information, expertise and to find others who are looking for what you are offering. Another Social Marketing option is to use bookmarking sites like MyJeeves.ask.com or Twitter.com.

Because social networking sites don’t charge a fee, this has become a very cost-effective way to learn and find leads.

Instead of simply putting up a website, submitting it to the search engines, crossing your fingers and hoping you get enough hits to stay in business, Social Marketing on social networking websites actually lets you immediately interact with people who share your goals or who are looking for what you have to offer. The goal of Social Marketing on social networking sites is to share information and build relationships with others.

When you are ready to use content sharing websites for Social Marketing, your goal will be to share the information you have, offer value to others and even possibly draw some interest from potential future partners. You can also use sites like EzineArticles.com to post articles about your business or passions.

The trick to using this kind of Social Marketing method is to make everything you write informative and engaging. Never use it to sell your product or services. Another benefit to using a site like this is that many times great articles are selected to be featured in publications or by webmasters for their websites. This gives you great additional exposure and potential leads.

Finally, bookmarking websites can help improve your rankings in the search engines. They let you “bookmark” the web pages you select so that you can easily return to them. They also work with the search engines to help commonly linked pages become ranked higher. Be careful not to only bookmark your web pages because this is considered to be the equivalent of spamming. Take a look around, find some great information and bookmark those in addition to your pages.

The goal of Social Marketing is simply to share information. The more people you meet and the more information you offer, you should eventually see an increase in traffic to your website and hopefully, in sales. The more you network, the easier it will become. It can be a time-consuming process, but well worth it when you begin to see results.

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