Add Social Media to Your Online Marketing Arsenal

The future of online marketing is social media. Businesses are enlisting SEM providers to help them make the most of these influential public forums. Find out how outsourcing can help your business promote its brand and products online.

Social media is among the most powerful marketing and PR tools available today. Search engine marketing specialists are helping businesses play the newest game in online marketing to promote their brand in the public sphere. Forrester Research predicts that by 2013, businesses will spend almost $4.6 billion in Web 2.0 tools in order to tap into social networks. Its April 2008 report forecast forty-three percent growth in the social media market.

What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media refers to all the shared or community-based content on the web: wikis, blogs, microblogs (Twitter), newsgroups, and sites for sharing video, photos, links, and writing (YouTube, Flickr, MySpace). These vast public forums present an invaluable resource for businesses to get across a marketingmessage or increase engagement with their brand.

How Can Businesses Make the Most of the Social Media Marketplace?
Social media is a grassroots enterprise built on constantly evolving content. The old rules of print media marketing dont apply here, nor do the banner ad-based strategies of early search engine marketing. Businesses new to this game can get up to speed by signing on with a search engine marketing consultant.

Social media outsourcing providers handle the complex, ongoing engagement necessary for companies to maintain a presence on the major public forums. Tasks may include:

• Building a website
• Optimizing the site for search engine marketing
• Networking and Linking
• Publishing and updating content regularly
• Sharing and interacting with the online community
• Monitoring the site

The Benefits of Social Media Outsourcing
Establishing an effective social media campaign takes intimate knowledge of the available media and the techniques that resonate with users in each community. Social media marketing takes a greater degree of sensitivity than traditional search engine marketing, since users prize these platforms for their genuine, grassroots character. Heavy-handed advertorial content or product promotion will not sit well with this constituency, who regard brazen commercialism as astroturfing (faking grassroots content). Social media audiences demand value from commercial content.

Online marketing consultants offer this insider expertise, along with the bandwidth necessary to create and maintain an active social media presence. By signing on with a social media consultant, businesses can expect to have an effective social media marketing campaign up and running in thirty days or less, says outsourcing industry analyst Frank Casale.

Social media is the coming wave of online marketing. No business can afford to ignore this influential media space. With professional SEM or social media outsourcing company willing to share their expertise, no business has to miss out.

Sources
The Wall Street Journal
The New York Times
CRM Buyer