What is Social Media Marketing

You must have heard about Social Media Marketing or marketing using Web 2.0 tools and would have definitely wondered what is this all about?? When was the first version of the web launched after all??

Well, to explain you Social Media Marketing, let me first explain you, what is Web 2.0! The following video will be very helpful in explaining this:

This video is one of my favorites and is very informational as you can see for yourself. Coming back to the main topic, every thing that you see around on the net today is Web 2.0 or Social Media (As these are very social)- Blogs, Social Networking, RSS, Social Bookmarking, Photo Sharing etc, they all form part of Web 2.0.

Since all these platforms are user friendly, they are very popular among those on the internet, mainly the younger audience and they love to spend a lot of time on it. Thus, by promoting your site through these mediums, you can tap into a large - highly active set of internet users. However, you need to be really careful in putting yourself in front of this audience cause if they dont like what you say, you may end up getting a real bashing!!

Popular Social Media Marketing tools are:

1. Blogs - WordPress, Blogger, Typad
2. Social Bookmarking - Digg, Delicious, Furl, StumbleUpon and many others
3. Social Networking - FaceBook, MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, Ecademy
4. RSS Feed Distribution
5. Posdcasting
6. Video Distribution - YouTube, MetaCafe
7. Micro Blogging - Twitter (The next big thing on the internet!)

I will discuss in my future posts how you can best formulate your strategy for each one of the above to get the maximum out your Social Media Campaign!

In the meantime, you can read more about Social Media Marketing from SEOMoz.org.