Media | Marketing | Communication

Social Media Marketing and the Viral Effect

// July 6th, 2007 // Media

The world of search and website marketing has really changed over just the past few years.  For many in search, it seems like it was not too long ago that webmasters could have their sites ranking highly on search engines for certain keywords if they took care of the basic tags – meta and description.

Times have changed since then, of course, as there is so much competition in search that now webmasters have to apply extensive search engine optimization and search engine marketing strategies on their sites, in order to get them to rank highly for their keywords across the engines.  Video submissions to such venues as You Tube and Meta Café have recently become staples in all SEO and SEM work.

Social Media Marketing is a relatively new and powerful website marketing tool, and involves increasing a site’s online exposure, across the numerous Social Community Websites and Networks that are now out there.  This increased exposure also involves getting people on these sites and networks to discuss that particular site, as well as its products and/or services, so that a dynamic viral marketing effect is created.

Social Media sites include such popular venues as Amazon, Craig’s List, Digg, Ebay, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, Google, Live Journal, My Space, Orkut, Twitter and Yahoo. Adept webmasters or SEO people can access these social media communities, and collect relevant data on user behavior and interests, so that they can find out what customers really want.

Social Media Marketing involves several tactics and strategies, including the following: 

1. Submission of the website to all major Social Media Networks and Websites
2. In-house production of promotional video for the site, and submission of the video to www.youtube.com.  The video’s listing on You Tube is also optimized, and placed on top of the site’s ranking lists, thereby ensuring maximum exposure
3. Optimization of the video across major search engines, with frequent engine-indexing
4. Creation of community and friendship groups on Facebook, Friendster and Twitter, with subsequent recruitment of people from around the world who are interested in the Streaming Community
5. Participation in various forums on Community Networking, with the client site introduced to online visitors through Streaming Community Websites
6. Submissions of site articles, newsletters and press releases to several submissions websites
7. Submission of the site’s listing to Live Journal
8. Employment of MSN Messenger as a full-fledged website marketing tool, to inform the cyber world about the site
9. Strategic submission of site-related pictures to Flickr, so that visitors notice these submitted materials
10. Creation of relevant site blogs, with these blogs indexed by Google

Webmasters and SEO Consultants working on a site can effectively complement their SEO and SEM work with these types of Social Media Marketing strategies, further empowering that site to significantly increase its online presence, attract more relevant traffic, and ramp up online conversions.

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About Author

Brad Lombardo received his B.Ed. from the University of Toronto and his M.A. from McGill University. He has worked as a business manager, marketing consultant, account executive, admissions counselor, high school teacher and sportswriter. He has written a still to be published hockey book, and is currently penning a movie script based on his experiences as a Canadian teenager living in Spain.