Internet Marketing Through the Social Media

Social Media has become very important in an internet marketers promotional arsenal. Simply described the social media is a platform where people gather and form communities to discuss and share information. The platform - a website which provides technology for integration of the written word, audio and video – can be used by members to post their information in any form. The internet marketer could use these communities to place subtle messages or provide links during his own conversations in a unobtrusive and natural manner.

One of the greatest distinctions between an industrial or company website and the social media sites is that the content originates from users and not the promoters of specific business.

Internet marketers could effectively use this to contribute his own content to interested communities and create huge traffic to his own web sites.

The social media could be in different forms offering different applications to its communities.

Some of the major such social media applications are:

Blogs such as blogger.com and wordpress.com. You can create your own web pages once you set up your account and post content regularly.

Micro blogs. The most famous is Twitter.com. Twitter allowes send and receive one sentence communications of 140 characters. Once you sign up you can chose to receive messages from people who share similar interest. The messages can also be received through SMS and RSS.

Then there are the social networking sites such as facebook.com, linked in.com, orkut.com or my space.com being the most popular ones. The networking sites offer many interesting applications for users to share content and create huge common interest communities. The networking in these sites has become so popular and widespread that some of the organizations have banned them from being used by their staff to increase productivity.

Then there are the book marking sites such as delicious.com and stumbleupon.com. These sites allow the user to find pages and store them online. The users can also post comments and rate different websites, pages or videos. These can then be accessed by interested peer user communities based on the recommendations.

Internet marketing community can use news sharing sites such as dig.com or reddit.com. In these news mediums you can share any web pages you found interesting on the internet with your own comments and voting on them. Based on the voting they will be ranked up or down on the site.
Then there are the photo sharing and vdeo sharing. We all know flickr and youtube.com.

Now there are tons of other such social media sites for the internet marketer to make use of and profit from quick traffic through these sources. However a word of caution. Don’t use these sites blatantly for posting buy messages or self promotion as the people using these communities have come together for sharing interest and fun and blatant commercial exploitation could have you banned quickly.

The best way to use these communities to market is to blend in with the community and let your products be discovered naturally by the users. Once you learn the art of marketing to these communities effectively, you could be generating a huge and profitable internet traffic and income.