Everyone’s talking about social media marketing services. Do you Tweet? Do you Facebook? LinkedIn perhaps, or FriendFeed, Tumblr or Posterous? For the uninitiated the whole thing can sound like a complete geek-fest, a chamber of commerce business breakfast club gone mad. We spend our lives avoiding the party sharks. You know the sort of people, stained ties, polyester, who stalk you until you find yourself pressed into a corner unable to refuse a business card, a pitch; every sinew of your ever-so polite, well mannered gentility stretched to breaking point. If you’ve ever had the misfortune to have friends get sucked into a multilevel marketing scheme and have ended up on their hit list, having to make a sharp exit after cheap German wine and nibbles, then you will know exactly why social media marketing might start ringing the alarm bells for some.

Don’t worry. Social media marketing and social media marketing services; new marketing services that many companies are now looking at employing agencies (often their SEO or online marketing agencies) to perform, if applied well, offer nothing but fabulous opportunities. Opportunities to find out where people online are talking about your company, to hear what people are saying about you and to share your input too. Social media marketing is about influence, about authority, reputation, respect, how to give it and how to earn it. It’s new and it’s potentially extremely powerful.

SMM is all about engagement. It’s not enough now to simply blare your sales message out as loudly as possible through all the traditional marketing channels and just wait for the masses to flock to your proposition. Sure, the traditional channels are still largely valid, still viable. But if you were wondering why Internet, mobile phone and social media marketing spend is up 15% on last year and traditional advertising is in steep decline (nearly 20% in some parts of the newspaper industry), it’s because of engagement. New technology creates a more interactive, personalised, more nuanced, less broadcast based media. Facebook, Myspace and YouTube share a combined audience of 250 million unique visitors a month. None of them existed 6 years ago. The average American Teen sends in the regions of 2,500 texts a month. SMM is big and getting bigger rapidly.

The important thing to remember though is that social media marketing is less Usain Bolt, more David Bedford. It’s a long term game so whether you factor social media marketing services into your marketing mix yet or not, isn’t a deal breaker. Don’t leave it too long though – you wouldn’t want the competition stealing a march. Talk to your SEO or Internet Marketing team for an in depth analysis of how their social media marketing services can help you win more business online.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 20th, 2009 at 5:01 pm and is filed under SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.