Introduction to Social Media Marketing

Social media are media for social contact that uses highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media utilize web-based technologies to transform and broadcast media monologues into social media dialogues.

Social media have been reorganized to reach consumers through the internet. Social media have become engaging to big and small businesses. Big and credible brands are utilizing social media to reach customers and to build or maintain their reputation in the market. The ability to reach more consumers globally has also increased with social media continuing to grow. Twitter, for example, has expanded its global reach, among others, to Japan, Indonesia, and Mexico. This means that brands can now advertise in multiple languages and therefore reach a broader range of consumers.

Social media have turn into the new "tool" for effective business marketing and sales. Popular social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook and Twitter are social media most commonly used for socializing and connecting with friends, relatives, and colleagues.

Social media has developed into a platform that is easily accessible to anyone with internet access, thus opening doors for organizations to enhance their brand awareness and aid conversations with the customer. Also, social media serves as a comparatively inexpensive platform for organizations to execute their marketing campaigns. Organizations can get direct feedback from their customers and targeted markets.

Social media marketing has proved beneficial to organizations and individuals by providing them an additional channel for customer support, a better means to achieve customer and competitive insight, and a simple yet effective method of managing their reputation online.

Key factors that ensure its success are its importance to the customer, the value it provides them with, and the strength of the foundation on which it is built. A strong foundation serves as a stand in which the organization can integrate its information and direct customers on its recent developments through other social media channels, for example; article and press release publications.

The most popular platforms include Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and MySpace.