Online Marketing: What is Social Internet Marketing? | Examples of the Social Web | Benefits of Social Internet Marketing
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Social Internet Marketing
Return to the index of frequently asked questions about online marketing.
What is Social Internet Marketing?
Social internet marketing refers to various activities that you (or your Web marketing company) undertake to integrate yourself and your business into online communities.
Social networking websites are particularly popular with younger Internet audiences and make a wide range of online activities available to their users such as: making personal profile pages, finding friends, uploading photos, musics, jokes and videos, leaving comments for people, posting blogs, adopting pets, playing games, quizzes and lots more. There is huge competition between social networking websites for user numbers and they continually add new enticements to keep a notoriously fickle audience interested in using them.
As an activity for online businesses, social internet marketing may be facilitated through any of the following mediums:
- Forums — Online discussion sites.
- Blogs / guest blogging — Online journals featuring regular posts.
- Content sites — Any online publication accepting contributions from 3rd parties.
- Facebook — Free-access social networking website with over 250 million active users.
- Bebo — Social networking website primarily used by teenagers.
- Digg — A website on which people can share news about web content and vote on their favourites.
- StumbleUpon — Helps users 'stumble upon' websites matching their personal interests.
- delicious — Social bookmarking web service enabling you to store and share favourite bookmarks with users throughout the world.
- reddit — A social news website on which users can post links to, and vote on, content on the Internet.
- twitter — Social networking and microblogging service for tweets (posts) utilising instant messaging, SMS or a web interface.
- YouTube — A video sharing website on which users can upload and share videos (owned by Google).
Benefits of Social Internet Marketing
Social internet marketing can help promote your online business to an extremely wide and Internet-savvy audience. However, creating an online identity and keeping posts, comments and writing current, interesting and relevant can be time-consuming. It is also important to remember that if one or more people from the same company create online profiles, that guidelines for what is acceptable to the company and what isn't are created prior to online publishing of any sort.
If the main targets for your business are Internet-savvy, young professionals, then social internet marketing may be of interest to you, as it can:
- Increase traffic to your website from new sources
- Increase awareness of your brand and branding
- Help you gain online exposure through highly targeted communities
- Increase 'word of mouth' promotion between Internet users
- Increase your website's link popularity.
Glossary
If these terms sound like a foreign language to you, please don't stew about it. You can refer to the (easy-to-understand) glossary of terms for more information.
Store Them Away
If you want to keep any pages tucked away in your online pantry of goodies, simply bookmark the relevant page in your browser by clicking:
- 'Favourites' (if you're using Internet Explorer/IE)
- 'Bookmarks' (if you're using Firefox).