If you have a website selling products or offering services or just publishing content for ad revenue, social media marketing is a viable method that will generate you massive amount of targeted traffic and make your site profitable over time. Recently, it was said that Dell had earned $3 million in revenue directly through twitter since 2007, when it started posting coupons and word of new products on the microblogging site.

So what really is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is a form of internet marketing strategy based upon the utilization of social media or any other collaborative networks to inter-connect with people, promote your ideas, and build new business partnerships. Basically, the more people you reach, or the more people get connected with you, the quicker people will be exposed to your business and then the quicker they will visit your website.

Social Media Network is divided into Social Networking sites and Social Bookmarking sites. So many internet users and even social media marketers are confusing social networking sites with social bookmarking sites. Social networking sites include popular sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Youtube, Bebo, Ning, or Google Buzz. Social bookmarking sites include well-known sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, or Del.icio.us.

One of the advantages of using social media networks as marketing tools is that it is fun, you can reach a lot of people and it’s free. You begin to meet a lot of people that you normally wouldn’t run into during the normal course of your business.

Effective social media marketing takes your search engine positioning and ranking to a higher level as it helps to foster a more deep relationship with your customers. Sharing a good post/article on these networks can realistically acquire a large number of high quality links which will lead to multiple benefits for any website. Do this enough and your search traffic will undoubtedly increase.

Social media marketing is heavily dependent upon building long-term relationships with your potential consumers rather than focusing on the quick one time sale. What’s even better about social media marketing is that you have the potential to reach more people in a quicker way for less cost than traditional advertising.

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