Social Media Marketing & Advertising Social Media Marketing enables companies to increase awareness, build authority and improve the positions in the search engine results. SMM can either be employed as an independant strategy or aid search engine optimization and online reputation management efforts. Due to the fact that SMM is built on the model of user generated content, it has been quickly recognised as an important component in any search optimization and marketing campaign.

Mediums Used In Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing in our definition includes the followings:

• Social Bookmarking (eg. Delicious, Google Bookmarks)
• Social News (eg. Digg, Reddit)
• Social Networking (eg. Facebook, LinkedIn)
• Social Tagging (eg. StumbleUpon)
• Social Broadcasting (eg. Youtube, Podcasts)
• Social Answers and Collaboration (eg. Yahoo Answers, Wikipedia)

Benefits Of Social Media Marketing

There are many benefits associated with the use of social media marketing, including:

• Creating awareness of great content which can lead to thousands of unique visits per day.
• Increasing quality traffic volume, RSS and content subscriptions.
• Building authority of content publisher in targeted topics and industries.
• Developing a network of individuals with similar interests.
• Building thousands of natural links which aids search engine optimization efforts.
• Managing online reputation of an organization.

Though social media marketing brings many benefits to an organization, it is not necessarily for every organization. Social Media Marketing must be carefully considered in the presence of a larger campaign as well as each medium's strengths and weaknesses.