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.

Here are a few free e-books from HubSpot and Who’s Blogging What that are definitely useful when it comes to learning more about social media marketing and lead generation.  All files are PDFs and will open in a new window.

Social Media Lead Generation

Using LinkedIn for Business (great tips in here)

Who’s Blogging What 2010: Collective Wisdom From Social Media Experts

Does anyone else have any free e-books, webinars, or other resources to share? If so, email The Social Robot using the Contact tab to the left or leave a comment with the URL below.

The web’s best stories on SEM, Social Media, and more, for the first week in March.

Build your integrated marketing team
Engaging a web partner- before the “I Do’s”
Microsoft and Yahoo deal cleared
Carnival, Travelocity say SEO and social media behind traffic surge
SEO recommendations don’t implement themselves!
5 ways to maximize social media marketing productivity in the workplace
Do’s and dont’s of social media marketing
Time for companies to embrace social media marketing

Here’s what I’ve found this week for our weekly link round-up!

How to use social media to acquire staff
There’s no right way to blog
Google blurs the link between paid and un-paid results again (opinion)
3 ways to optimize your bidding strategies
5 social media marketing stats that will blow your mind
How e.l.f. became a social media giant
Why you need a strategy for social media
Bubble Motion launches Twitter-Like voice blogging service for mobile phones (TechCrunch)

New, real-time, up to the minute search has become the next big thing in both Google and Bing. While many people are concerned that this may ‘cheapen’ the quality and value of regularly indexed search results, having tweets and Facebook profiles crawled almost immediately after their conception will not be detrimental to search engine results. And here’s why:

UPDATE: As of Jan 2010, Facebook has blocked Seppukoo’s API access to their website.

If Facebook has taken over your life but you can’t find a way out, an “imaginary art group” has created a new web site that can help. Seppukoo.com allows you to deactivate your Facebook account with a virtual ritual suicide befitting of a samurai warrior.

Named after seppuku, an ancient Japanese samurai ritual in which samurai would plunge a sword into their own stomachs to escape defeat by their enemies, the web site invites users to “impress your friends, disconnect yourself” and “discover what’s after your Facebook life.” By entering your Facebook user ID and password (the site says no data will be stored on its server), you can customize a memorial page that will be sent to all your Facebook friends, who will have the opportunity to leave a farewell message.

If you later decide that life is just not complete without Facebook, you can log into the site to reactivate your account.

The creators of the site, Les Liens Invisibles (which translates to “The Invisible Links”) claims the site was not started to attack Facebook, but simply to help people “rediscover the importance of being anyone, instead of pretending to be someone.” Les Liens Invisibles even has its own Facebook page.

Karen Eisenbraun is a freelance writer and is currently residing in the Kansas City Metro. She has experience in SEO, content management, website design, and green living. When not working, she enjoys rock climbing, yoga, and occasionally throwing herself out of airplanes.

Be sure to check out my latest guest post on Search Engine Land, where I discuss what it will take for sponsored social media message campaigns to be successful.

Because social media is so personalized, it takes a lot a committment to honesty and integrity when deciding to post or buy sponsored social media.

To read the full article, please visit How to Monetize Social Media: The Right Way.

Sometimes the best posts about our industry (social media and SEM) come from unlikely sources. One such example is this great article, entitled “Find out how social media can save you money” by Alison Brownrigg on nwsource, a shopping and fashion information portal owned by the Seattle Times.

Alison gives several tips to social media savvy-shoppers on how to use websites like facebook and twitter in order to garnish the best deals. One such tip is to search for different twitter hashtags (http://search.twitter.com) like #holidaydeals.

Be sure to read the full article and come back here to share more tips or let others know what you think!

Blogspot.com, Xanga.com, Facebook, MySpace…the list of blogging sites goes on and on, and it seems as if the list grows daily. What is this thing called “blogging” that seems to have taken over the world of social media? Blogging is a term used for web logging or creating journals that you post online for others to read and comment on. Within the past few years, video blogging has become ever popular because of its ease of use and widespread reach.

So how does blogging tie into social media? The answer to this question is simple…

Blogging brings the audience to the social media outlet like nothing else before it…and social media does the same for blogging…they scratch each other’s backs. Bloggers flock to social media sites because they know that is where the audience is, and social media grows by the minute because people are flocking there to read each other’s blogs.

Facebook and Blogging

Originally created as a way to keep college students in contact with each other, Facebook has evolved into a social media giant in a short amount of time. What is the draw? Who doesn’t like logging into their Facebook account and seeing what their friends all over the country or world are doing at that moment. It’s like being a fly on the wall that has been invited in! You can become a fan of your favorite author, join a group specifically for people who love tomato soup, or you can become a political activist.

Not only does Facebook allow you to create short blogs, also known as statuses, but you can also post links to websites you want to share or create notes (basically blogs) that you can “tag” and invite your friends to read. Mostly Facebook is a form of blogging that only allows people you like to read your entries, but there are other sites that are open to the prying and inquisitive eyes of everyone with a computer.

MySpace Blogging

MySpace has hundreds of millions of users, and each one of them has access to everything you write about on your MySpace profile (unless you make it private). MySpace is the internet hub for meeting, greeting and befriending people from all walks of life. Share music, links, videos, pictures and your inner most feelings through your personal profile. Rub elbows with your favorite band, movie star or athlete without ever having to introduce yourself.

Blogging on MySpace is easy because all you have to do is create a blog and post the link on social bookmarking sites (digg.com, reddit.com, delicious.com, mixx.com, diigo.com) so that anyone browsing the internet for something interesting to read will come upon the link to your blog, click on it, read the blog and get interested, entertained, awed, disgusted, intrigued or offended by what you’ve posted.

Blogging and Social Media: Can’t Have One Without the Other…

People use social media sites like Facebook and MySpace to promote their blogs, links and political ideals to a very large audience. Blogging not only allows people to express themselves online, it is also a crucial tool in the social media toolbox. Without people to blog and spread the word, social media sites wouldn’t really exist. Does anyone visit MySpace or Facebook for the advertisements? No. They go to see what their friends and families are doing, learning, and blogging about. The small, small world has gotten smaller thanks to social media and bloggers.

Blogging and social media are the Siamese twins of the internet…they cannot be separated without serious damage to one or the other, or both.

Courtesy of Gary Hayes.