Social media marketing, which is the use of social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace to draw traffic to a website, is definitely on the rise. It is predicted that in the next five years, spending on social media marketing will rise as much as 21% for the average company. If you’re not already into social media, you may very well question how internet chatter could be so valuable for your company.

The real value of social media marketing comes from its grounding in community. Just as in the non-cyber world word-of-mouth recommendations can be more effective in drawing customers than expensive ad campaigns; the chatter on social media networks is effective in drawing traffic because it comes from genuine person-to-person (cyber) contact.

The key word here is ‘genuine’. The users of social media networks tend to be highly marketing-savvy and fakery doesn’t go very far within social media sites. In the early stages of social media marketing, some companies made the mistake of attempting to draw viewers to their site in much the same way they would with any other marketing campaign, using brand names and well-rehearsed wording for all their content. The result was that the companies were shunned within the social media networks.

The way that social media networks are set up must be taken into account within your approach. Within these sites, people aim to engage with each other on a human level. It is not for no reason that many of these sites have a ‘village’ feel, either in their branding or design. In this kind of environment, companies that present their usual marketing jargon get the same kind of reception as a door-to-door salesperson usually gets on a sophisticated city block. When you approach a social media network, it’s best to be yourself and engage with the community naturally, as well as professionally.

Using social media marketing can draw traffic to your site in a number of ways. The first is through inbound links coming from these sites. A good campaign can result in thousands of quality new inbound links for your site. Not only do these links bring in their own traffic, they influence your site’s rankings and can give you a real boost.

Another way is through the social media site’s own ranking. If you’re participating in a popular social media site (and, let’s face it, participation in an unpopular one defeats your purpose) your keywords and your business name will feature in a highly-ranked site. This can be great when you want to maintain control of the top ten on a search engine results page.

Even better, using a plugin from a social media site can ensure your main site is supplied with continuous fresh content. Recent changes to Twitter plugins are a great example of this, updating your site with fresh content every time you micro-blog on Twitter. This is great value for using the fastest growing large website in the UK.

The best kind of reception your social media marketing campaign can have is to generate natural links to your site. You may have the opportunity to create reciprocated links. These aren’t quite as valuable for your purposes.

As more and more companies come to realise how valuable social media marketing is, working social media into your search engine optimisation campaign becomes vital. SEO Consult is an invaluable resource in developing such sophisticated SEO campaigns.

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