Social Media Marketing

Golden Triangles are now dominated by social media. Because social content is updated more often and users link to the content, social media sites rank within the search engine results page, providing businesses another opportunity to increase visibility online.

Social media can be divided into several buckets:

• Virtual Universes (Second Life, World of Warcraft)
• Social Networks (Myspace, Facebook, Xing)
• Blogs and Livecasts (Blogger, Seesmic, etc.)
• Forums (Phorum, phpBB)
• Microblogging (Pownce, Twitter)
• Diggs
• Multimedia Sharing (YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare)

The benefits of social media are to connect with people, keep branding position, generate more traffic, enlarge targeted segment, and increase the user experience. Good social media strategy requires a lot of time and energy. You need to stay connect with your community and be consistent. The strategy will not work if you come and leave. The first step is to start in the community where you think you have the most chance for success. Do not push marketing right away, instead provide value to the community through conversation.

Some good social media tips:

• Have a site that is social media friendly
• Pick communities you relate to
• Check what worked before
• Create high quality, link worthy content
• Understand how to submit and push social media campaigns
• Understand what to do with success
• Be Social

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Contributed by: Thanika Smavatkul, Milestone Inc.