DMN3 Blog

You only have finite resources for your social media marketing program. Where should you invest them? Here are some thoughts that can help you…

Your research should help by identifying the social media sites that draw visitors who make up your target audience. You can read my previous posts on this subject here.

Social Media Marketing: Do You Know How?

Social Media Marketing: Where Do You Begin?

Many Kinds of Social Media: It is easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer number and variety of online social media sites. One list of social media sites can be found here.

You must select those that are most relevant to reach your intended audience, i.e., target market. Some are much more valuable than others when it comes to achieving your marketing objectives.

There are many classifications of social media. You can find one such classification on Wikipedia here. For business purposes, there are three basic kinds of social media. They are:

1. Publishing sites
2. Sharing sites
3. Networking sites

You should be using all three kinds of sites as part of your social media marketing strategy.

Social Media Publishing Sites: These online services include blogging sites, forums, discussion sites, Wikis and publishing sites for video and other content. Publishing content to these sites is one way your business can effectively spread information that is perceived as relevant to your targeted market segment. Links from the published content back to your websites also helps with search engine rankings as well.

Social Media Sharing Sites: Examples of these online sharing services include social bookmarking, micro blogging and content sharing sites. Examples of such sites include StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Digg, Twitter, Flickr, etc. Combining an effective online profile with good recommendations and your own relevant content can have a positive impact on how users perceive your organization and builds trust.

Social Media Networking Sites: Most people will equate social media with social media networking sites. These sites facilitate networking among community members with similar interests. Their use continues to grow with visitors from all over the world. See my post on this growth here:

Social Media Continues to Attract More Users

The most well known of these sites are Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Ning. There are many others as well, often dedicated to a specific interest. How best to market to members of social networking sites is an on-going problem.  Members of the community react negatively to the intrusion of blatant promotional content. Neither does display advertising appear to work as well on these sites as other websites.

An effective social media marketing strategy should use a mix of these kinds of sites.

In my next post, I will provide some specific marketing strategies for some of the better known social media sites.