Understanding Social Media Marketing
Just recently Social Media and Social Media marketing have become buzz words. This is due to the popularity of sites like MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Redit, etc. Social media has two components: user generated content (stories, articles, information) and the ability to form networks of friends for sharing that content.
In sites like MySpace and Facebook users create their profile pages, pictures, and videos to embellish the pages. They can then have the ability to share everything with others in their friends’ network or the network as a whole.
In sites like Digg, YouTube, Flickr users submit summary of news articles, pictures, videos and vote on the contents submitted by others. Popular stories are featured on the homepage and they each have the ability to drive massive amount of traffic.
There are many variations of the two models described above, including a combination of the two.
Using social media sites to promote your product, services or a website is called social media marketing. There are two types of traffic you get when your content becomes popular in a social media site.
Direct traffic or the primary traffic comes from the site where it becomes popular. For sites like Digg, it can be huge and your server(s) should be ready to handle the surge in traffic without crashing.
When your site becomes popular in a social media site, people talk about your site and the post that becomes popular. Others will post links to the content. The secondary traffic or the indirect traffic flows from those links long after the surge due to the primary traffic is over.
So, what are the benefits of primary and secondary traffic from the social media sites? The primary traffic exposes your site to people who have no other means of knowing about your existence. Some of those visitors will become regulars to your site if you are providing something that they want on a regular basis - like a blog that discusses a topic they are interested in.
The greatest benefit is the natural links to your site given by others because they want to discuss your offering. Natural links from a large number of relevant sites improve your search engine rankings and organic search traffic.
Social media marketing lets you expose your site to a large group of people. If your search engine traffic has leveled off, shifting your focus to the social media marketing and becoming successful in that will take you to the next level in search engine traffic.
Best of all social media marketing is free. By making your site popular a couple of times in a year is enough to sustain increased traffic through out the year and very possibly allow you to convert those visitors into paying customers.