In a Web 2.0 world, social marketing leverages your business with audio, video, and text. As an example, blogging may very well turn out to be one of the most ingenuous marketing strategies for anyone who has an online business and is willing to commit to its process.

Web 2.0 seems such an unlikely stratagem that many online marketers are still wary of using as a marketing tactic, much to their disadvantage. Statistics show that marketers who have embraced and adopted social marketing have experienced unprecedented success.

Here are three reasons why social marketing is important for your online business.

#1 Social marketing gets you the information you need

Social marketing is a popular and effective way of getting vital information that is essential to the success of your business. Social networking directories such as Netscape and Digg are increasingly gaining favor as an option for people across the globe to keep in touch with the latest happenings in their area of interest.

Want to measure your content’s effectiveness? Try posting it to a Netscape or Digg like service. Blogging and submitting to pertinent social directories is an effective way of attracting and retaining important traffic.

#2 Social marketing is an easy and affordable way of directing & keeping traffic

Unlike conventional marketing, social marketing does not involve a huge marketing team or a prohibitive budget. As an example, consider the latest blogging tools. It only takes minutes to setup a WordPress blog and promptly bookmark top directories.

All you need to do is commit to updating your blog continuously with new and significant posts. A steady stream of interesting, relevant posts is a reliable way to sustain blog interest.

#3 Social marketing helps you develop a relationship with your customers

Developing interactive relationships with customers is crucial to the success of any business. Before the advent of social marketing, most online businesses had no dependable way of reaching out to customers either to prove their qualifications or to perform market research.

Blogging’s interactivity gives online businesses the previously unavailable opportunity of earning customer’s trust and increasing the chances not just for one time and repeat sales.

#4 Social Marketing is about the quality of traffic, not the quantity

Getting a mass of traffic to your site is irrelevant if nobody stays long enough to buy or download anything. Social marketing attracts pertinent traffic, gives potential buyers the opportunity to interact with the seller and voice their preferences. And, more importantly, allows buyers to interact with a related community, giving them the advantage of collective wisdom.

#5 Search engines love Social Marketing

When you blog around keyword-rich topics you attract the ‘eye of the spider’, which is always looking out for fresh, relevant and high-quality content.

Social media marketing is only the beginning of a long relationship with the open source web. Be willing to come aboard and expand your business.

First question to ask is: How old are you?

I know that might sound rude or impersonal but it’s relevant. I’m 41 and I was schooled in an environment that embraced PC’s. Google and Websites were only blips on the radar in the US when I was 14. Since then men and women of my age have grown to become accustomed to life with the internet. Recently our children have embraced the online social culture in the form of MySpace, Facebook and Google Blogger.

So it’s fair to say that new home buyers, second home buyers and even investors aged up to mid 40’s are now using the net to make their next purchasing decision. It’s also fair to say that the internet and current technology has broken down the age barrier when it comes to trawling the internet.

A recent client of mine, Rhino Realty in Queensland has broken tradition and opted for a fully self-managed website solution that has the Gen Y sector intrigued. This website has a social networking aspect and also includes a LIVE WEB CAM INSPECTION TOOL enabling buyers to view the property in realtime via their website. As far as we know, no other real estate agent has this facility. Web trials have just been completed with a social marketing group and the website will go live in 2 weeks.

Statistics have shown that over 80% of major purchasing decisions (homes, holidays, cars etc.) are researched online. Stats also indicate that a properly self-managed website can boost sales by an extra 31% per annum.

Todays technology has the younger generation in particular conversing online about property and investments.

Chances are, you are probably missing out on another sector of the market you didn’t even account for. The technology is available from Corporate Design Solutions in Queensland. It’s not exclusive to Rhino Realty and it’s not as expensive as you would think.

For a FREE Consultation visit our website, email us or call us.

When you do search engine optimization work for your website, are you taking social marketing into account? It’s important to use social media tools when doing off page SEO. When you do this, you’re increasing your backlinks and potential for traffic to your site.

A big part of internet marketing and SEO is social marketing. There are a lot of available free social media SEO tools that you can use to help optimize your website or blog. Search engine optimization strategies work well when they are done while taking into account that the search engines look at relationships and if the sites you want to promote have relationships with other sites, it appears that all those sites are more relevant. Social media is a tool that can help anyone who knows how to effectively use it.

When doing your off page SEO; which includes things that happen outside of your website that will help your website, look for quantity and quality and relevancy. Quantity is always good but if you bring your site 1000 visitors that are not already prequalified as being likely to be interested in what you’re selling, your conversion rate probably won’t be very high.

Quality is important so be sure you’re attracting quality visitors. You wouldn’t direct people in a gambling forum to your Christian book club and vice versa. The more likely your visitor is interested in your information or product, the better. If you’re going to use social marketing tools to help your business flourish, look for relevancy and the right demographics.

Search engines do look at relevancy so there are things you can do to help your SEO efforts such as:

- Join community forums in your niche. You can find them in abundance. Post often and put your website in your signature. Not only will you network and get backlinks from a related site but you’ll be sharing information with people that are likely going to be interested in what you have to sell. The community forum signature line is very good for SEO so use it to your full advantage.

- Join microblogging sites like Twitter and Plurk and network with people interested in your niche. You can post an update to new product releases and blogs. These sites may not seem like much at first glance but the more users you follow and the more that follow you, the better your traffic and SEO can be.

- If your site is a blog, join blogging networks like Technorati, MyBlogLog or Blog Catalog so people can find you based on tags and categories

- Use social bookmark tools like StumbleUpon and Digg. You can get additional backlinks and visitors this way.

- Join online profile sites which can help you put your URL in your profile and increase your backlinks. There are dozens of sites like this that you can join for free and put your URL or multiple URLs into.

Search engine optimization is an ongoing effort that can bring you fruit in both search engines and in terms of valuable traffic. On page SEO will help you once people get to your site so don’t forget to learn SEO tactics for optimizing on your website as well.