If i am not wrong ,Guru’s of internet marketing are calling Social Media Marketing the next big thing on the internet, A lot of people on the internet are are coming up with research papers, reports & other proofs to prove how Social Media Marketing is cost efficient,easy & effective way of marketing, So i also decided to write a little article on Social Media Marketing.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is an engagement with online communities to generate exposure, opportunity and sales. The number-one advantage is generating exposure for the business, followed by increasing traffic and building new business partnerships.

This is the defination from wikipedia. Very true, Social media marketing is all about establishing your self as a brand amongst the online communities.

Social Media & SEM

SEM is the process of increasing number of targeted visitors to your website by means of paid search listings or organic seo.

Social Media is a process of converting the targeted visitors coming to your website in to your subscribers(BLOG FEEDS) ,fans(Facebook Pals,Facebook Community members,youtube videos) ,followers(twitter followers), Providing them some or the other way to stay updated about your product or website.it helps you to get introduced to new targeted customers through word of mouth publicity &  viral marketing elements of social media marketing. Another advantage of social media is that you can influence the purchase decisions of your target audience,followers,subscriber by establishing your self as a brand in front of them. By showing that you as a brand do value your customer’s money,time & resources ,& you are always there to help your customers if they have any troubles with your products.

SEM & SM M go hand to hand, they are basically two sides of the internet marketing coin.

SEM willl always help you in developement of your social media strategies &amp SM M will always be helpful in your Search engine marketing strategies. SEM is basicaly dependent on PPC &amp Back Links. So when you start combining your Social media tactics with your SEM tactics, you staet gaining backlinks by creating a buzz about your product in the user community,Also when you are running SEM campaigns you can start converting your visitors in to FANS/SUBSCRIBERS/FOLLOWERS. &amp once your visitors become your follower you are bound to get the unfair advantage of social media marketing elements(word of mouth publicity &amp  viral marketing).

So basically according to me it is a good idea to mixup your SEM strategies with Socail Media Marketing.

Some of the key factors of social media marketing are:

• Creating a blog for your business & keep on updating it regularly with use full content so that you can get good number of rss subscribers.
• Publishing your news releases in the blogger world, creating a buzz about your product in the blogger world.(you can do this by buying paid blog posts on popular blogs)
• By creating twitter profile so that people can follow you on twitter
• Bookmarking your blogs on social bookmarking sites like digg &amp then by making shouts to spread the word.
• creating facebook,orkut,myspace profiles so that people can stay in touch with you.
• paid advertising on social networking sites like orkut,facebook,myspace,hi5 etc…
• taking care of all negative comments about you & your product on internet. Remember even a single negative comment can influence your potential customer’s purchase decision.
• creating videos & submitting them to popular sites like youtube,metacafe etc…, this does help creating a buzz about your product.

The onpage optimization includes following important factors:
Crawlable content
Title Tags
Meta keyword tags
Meta description
Alt tags for images
Keyword Density
URL
h1/ h2 tags
Site Maps
Internal Linking

Crawlable content:

The Content on your webpage has to be crawlable. Search engines can not crawl media files like videos,audios,images etc.. & yes except google no other search engine can crawl flash pages.

Title tags:

Title tags are a crucial part of seo. You must include your keywords in your page titles & you must have unique title for each page in your website.

Meta Tags:

The meta keywords tag is typically used to highlight a couple of the main
keyword phrases on which a page is focused. The meta description tag should be a few sentences to a paragraph of text that uses various versions of your keywords and describes the purpose of a given page.Search engines show the same description for web pages that is present in your Meta Description tag.

E.g:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”kw1,kw2,kw3″>
<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Description of the webpage”>

Alt Tags for images:

Search Engines can not read through images so it becomes necessary to add alt parameter in img tags.

e.g.<img src=”URL” alt=”keyword text”>

by doing this we tell the html compiler of a search engines that this image has something to do with keyword text &amp this image is related to the keyword text.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is not an extremely important factor, but you need to make sure that you do not over optmize your web page . You just need to make sure your keyword density is not abnormal.

URL

URL is one of the important factors in terms of search engine optimization. If you have your target keywords in your URL than seach engines obviously consider your web pages more relevent.

h1/h2

H1 / H2 html tags are also important when it comes to SEO. If you use target keywords in your header tags than it does add some +ve points to your seo strategy.

Site Maps

Site maps help search engines crawl all the pages in your website. So its good if you have sitemaps.

Internal Linking

Linking to your internal pages with target kywords is also a good strategy for onpage seo, Your site gets +ve points for doing that.