5 Examples of Social Marketing

Social marketing is the evolved state of word-of-mouth marketing, using new, Internet-based social media. Social media includes a plethora of social site people can use to spread the word about their business or Website. Social marketing offers the advantage of being inexpensive, but at the same time, it provides a highly targeted audience. In the correct and experienced hands, social marketing can multiply the profits of any business by increasing the number of customers.

Social marketing is best done through the various social media such as blogs, social networking websites, picture and video sharing sites, and targeting social bookmarking sites. The 5 best examples of social marketing are listed below:

Posting photographs of your products or diagrams showing how they work on photo-sharing networks can be a great way to market to the masses. A good example of this is the diagrams of chemical reactions on Flickr by the owner of a chemistry focused Web site. Not only did the Website owner show site visitors how various chemical reactions work, but he included a link back to his site at the bottom of each picture/diagram. So not only did he provide important diagrams, but he provided a link that takes visitors back to is own site to view other related diagrams and articles on chemistry related subjects.

A good way to market your product is by showing a video of your product's application on the Internet. Video sharing sites like YouTube and Yahoo Videos are a great way to do this. Real estate agents often put up videos of the properties they are selling. These days even music artists like Soulja Boy have posted videos on these Websites giving dance instructions for their songs, which in turn have further publicized their songs. Video sharing is a great social marketing utility.

Answering questions on Yahoo Answers is a great way of social marketing. Surprisingly, a lot of questions related to your product or specialization are probably being asked on Yahoo Answers already. All you have to do is go and answer them and you will have customers coming to your Website or business. A site that has done this effectively is PharmaXChange.info, a student resource site for pharmacy graduates with notes and animation on medicine.

Social Networking sites like Facebook and Orkut are great way for business to find geographically selective customers. Simply by selecting the area, you can find people who are from the locality of your business to target. A huge number of realtors are finding targeted customers within their locality of business through these social networking sites.

Blogging about your business is also a great way to gain popularity and a good reputation. By providing information about your product and asking other bloggers to write about your product is a great technique that many companies have adopted for social marketing. Note that these companies do reward the blogger who writes about them in some way, including reciprocal links and other useful Internet-based gifts.

A great way to increase your product visibility is through social bookmarking on sites like del.icio.us and digg.com. An almost infinite number of companies have successfully used social bookmarking to get their products better known. Social marketing is the future for telling people about your product. If you are a businessperson then it is most definitely recommended that you adopt this marketing strategy for effectively gaining customers.