What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing
What is Social Media Marketing?

There are a lot of terms in marketing nowdays and many of them merge together and most of them are very complimentary. It all boils down into the catch-alls of Internet Marketing, Digital Marketing, and Digital PR.

Social Media Marketing 

According to Wikipedia, “social media marketing is the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites.” This is a broad practice, encompassing social media strategy (what are your goals?), monitoring (what are people saying about you?), production (where are you going to live and what are you going to do?), development (is anyone listening?), engagement (have you been helped), and outreach (have you heard of us over here?). In its most basic, social media marketing is what you’re doing by creating an account on Twitter on behalf of your brand and maybe a Facebook Page; at it most complex, social media marketing is what major brands do every day, active social media customer support, real-time conversation monitoring, and the kind of brand stalking that allows big brands to Like, Favorite, Retweet, Follow, and Comment on just about every single mention of their names and brands on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube. 

Influencer Marketing 

According to Wikipedia, “Influencer marketing, (also Influence Marketing) is a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers.” Previously limited only to bloggers, influence marketing has widened the angle of its lens to realize that there are all sorts of influentials all over the Internet. Some of the most influential people online live on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and—believe it or not—message boards, forums, email lists.  Influencer marketing is good old fashioned traditional PR expanded to include these new influencers. 

Inbound Marketing 

According to Wikipedia, “Inbound marketing is promoting a company through blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, Newsletters, whitepapers, SEO, social media marketing, and other forms of content marketing which serve to attract customers.” While it might seem like this is anglerfish marketing (putting a pretty lure out there and just waiting for fish), it isn’t anymore. In 2014, inbound marketing is very proactive as Google becomes better and better and censuring and then preventing the sort of black hat and grey hat SEO tricks that have been the lifeblood of the what inbound marketing used to be (backlinks at any cost), it has now evolved into a combination of Search Engine Marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing, and Content Marketing.

Content Marketing 

According to Wikipedia, “Content marketing is any marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire and retain customers. This information can be presented in a variety of formats, including news, video, white papers, e-books, infographics, case studies, how-to guides, question and answer articles, photos, etc.” Notice a strange similarity to Inbound Marketing? They’re dance partners.  Content Marketing is the newsroom, Inbound Marketing is the paper; Content Marketing is production, Inbound marketing is distribution.

Search Engine Marketing 

According to Wikipedia, “Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) through optimization and advertising. SEM may use search engine optimization (SEO), which adjusts or rewrites website content to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages, or use pay per click (PPC) listings.” Because none of this actually works without Google’s love  and referral, I have included SEM, a subset of which is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Appealing to Robots and Algorithms  might very well be more important these days than appealing to humans. Like Social Media Marketing, SEM can be as simple as optimizing your blog by site using SEO techniques, making sure you’re intentional with your writing, hosting on a fast server in a quality data center as close to the Internet Backbone as possible.  
 
There are more new marketing terms, but today we have focusted only on the most relevant and most used.
 
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