Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing has exploded in the past few years as a way to advertise and drive free traffic. “Social media” is a very broad term that includes sites and services like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, social bookmarking sites like Digg and Del.icio.us, Youtube, and many more.

The main benefits of tapping into the power of social media are that it’s free and that your message has the potential to “go viral” and reach a huge amount of people quickly with no extra effort on your part. The difficulties of social media are how to get your voice heard above the millions of other people out there, and how to avoid being seen as a social media “spammer.” The key to being successful promoting products in the social media space is to provide content that’s worthwhile enough for people to actually want to follow you and take your advice when you recommend products.

Pros: Free; easy to get started and participate in; has the potential to reach huge audiences; many potential sites and services to participate in
Cons: Lots of competition on popular services like Twitter; many people on social networks don’t like to be sold to, so there’s the potential to be labeled a spammer