The first aim of any business is to be known amongst their target audience. This is no different for online businesses that strive to shine out amidst billions of sites. Online businesses aim to market their site in several different manners to gain them more customers and business. One such marketing technique is social media marketing.

Social media marketing is a term that defines marketing that is done via social networks, such as online communities, networks, blogs and many other marketing tools to raise awareness amongst their potential clients. These sites are used to publicize, make sales, create connections between the business and target market, and to handle customer service. Some common tools used to perform social media marketing are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Orkut and YouTube.

The three main aspects of social media marketing are firstly, it creates a buzz and attracts readers with catchy and impressive messages. This buzz spreads through the Internet through contact between users who in turn pass it on to their own contacts. Within moments, these messages spread like wild fire.

Another aspect is that it gathers all fans of a brand or company together and allows them to interact with one another, create an identity and communicate their interest for this brand or set of products. It is also based on online conversations that cater around the business, and brings together current and potential customers. Their loyalty would also in turn promote one’s brand and raise awareness amongst other possible clients.

Through either simple networking, or marketing, these social media outlets help websites gain an online presence rapidly. They allow one to reach their target audience regardless of which part of the world they reside in. Another great advantage of social media marketing is, when done well, it could help enhance the search engine friendliness of one’s website.

Effective social media marketing would help generate a good number of quality backlinks to one’s site. These tools help the members of social networks to resend links to one’s websites to other interested viewers, hence adding more backlinks and increasing the popularity of one’s website. This way, their social media marketing campaign achieves two purposes-increasing search engine ranking and online visibility.

In conclusion, social media marketing is effective and natural. It is a great source of web traffic, and achieves great results at a low cost. This form of marketing would work well with any other advertising campaign.

My first Search Engine Land article was published today! Search Engine Land is one of the top SEM websites and gets over 500k visits a month! My article offers effective ways to measure the value of social media marketing when it comes to business.

To read it, please visit How to Measure The Value of a Fan or Follower in Social Media. Don’t forget to comment and share!

Also, SearchCap: The daily SEL digest also included my article as the 1st one in their list of top news:

Yay!

Hashtags are probably the single-most underused and undervalued aspect of Twitter. For those who have a few characters to spare in their tweet, adding an applicable hashtag may make a major difference to the amount of users who read your tweet and may increase your follower count.

For those reading who don’t know what hashtags are, they are a pound sign (#), following by a keyword that relates to the tweet. They are usually placed at the end of a tweet, but can also be integrated into the tweet itself.

• Example 1: “New Blog Post About the Value of Internet Marketing at http://URL.com #marketing #internet

• Example 2: “New Blog Post About the Value of #internet #marketing at http://URL.com

Hashtags are useful because the # sign makes them clickable, taking users to the search results for that keyword. Additionally, when users manually go to Twitter’s search page and type in a keyword (marketing), they will receive tweets that not only include the word marketing, but also any tweets that have #marketing as a hashtag.

Another important thing to note is the fact that a tweet doesn’t have to have the hashtag keyword in it to use that hashtag. (Example 3: “Learn how to increase your ROI at http://URL.com #marketing”) While this may be beneficial to include hashtags that offer a more generalized topic to categorize your tweet, it can also be abused by spammers who use the trending topics on Twitter (keywords and hashtags that many people have been tweeting about; celebrities and movie titles are hugely popular) to promote their spam messages. (Example 4: “Make money blogging TODAY! http://spam.com #Transformers2”) Make sure your hashtag relates to your post, or it may be caught by Twitter administrators as spam.

In a nutshell, hashtags increase followers because they make it easy for users to find your tweets when they search for an applicable keyword. This will lead them to either click on the URL you’ve provided (therefore increasing your website traffic) or to visit your personal Twitter page and begin to ‘follow’ your tweets. This is an easy thing to do that doesn’t take any extra time and may help you gain visibility on Twitter.

P.S. From a totally unscientific and unanalytical standpoint, every time the Social Robot twitter account uses applicable hashtags, we receive about 30% more traffic to the tweeted blog post and usually gain about 2-5 new followers.

With the number of webpages reaching into the trillions and beyond, it is hard to make your website and internet marketing strategy stand out from the rest. Here is a list of guidelines to follow to ensure that your business gets more attention online.

• Solid design across the board. Pay money for a great website layout. It’s worth it and will pay you back ten-fold. If the e-commerce side of a website is hard to use, then users simply aren’t going to use it, especially because there are 1,000s of websites out there that are better than you. Same goes for company sites that aren’t e-commerce. Have a clear, easy-to-navigate layout.
• Easily Recognizable Logo. Again, this is something worth paying money for. This logo can also be used on your offline campaigns, such as promotional material, correspondence headers, and business cards. Logos that stand out make people remember who you are.
• A Flowing Social Media Campaign. If you are willing to shell out the money and time for a great website and logo, then your efforts in social media should be the same. Users don’t want to go visit a great website, click to go to that company’s twitter profile, and be faced with a stale twitter feed with a boring background. Stay consistent and use the same branding and color schemes that are on your website.
• Make your company interesting through marketing. It doesn’t matter if you sell nails or anything else that seems to be the most boring topic on earth. Create an engaging and unique campaign about an animated nail that is looking for its perfect hammer. Don’t be afraid to be silly and make it fun. That is what gets people’s attention.
• Make your online content breathe. It’s not enough to have a well-designed website. It has to be alive. This is done by regular blog posts;  recent site/company updates on the main page, blog, and social media profiles; and regular customer interaction. Respond to customer correspondence quickly. Answer people reaching out to you on Facebook and Twitter that same day. Comment on a photo one of your Facebook users posted. The key here is to keep reminding your current and potential clients that you are there, plugged in, and read to fill their needs.
• Think outside the box. Sure, a great website, blog, and Twitter profile are great, but what you do with is what counts. Draw customers in with Twitter coupons that customers will only see if they are following you. Donate a portion of your profits from every sale generated on your e-commerce site to charity. You can even offer Free Shipping to customers that answer a riddle or trivia question about your company.

These are the types of enthralling marketing techniques that will increase company visibility online. To stand out from the crowd, do what everyone else isn’t doing or do what they are afraid to do.

And most of all, don’t be afraid of failing– that is usually how the best marketing campaigns are born.