Kenneth Dreyer blog

Upon the creating of the version two of the internet (web 2.0), we have seen a rise of a new type of websites. Websites that made it easier for users to interact with each other. We call them social sites, and from social sites we get Social Media Marketing aka SMM.

This is an introduction post for me new category on this blog, Social Media Marketing. I will use this opportunity to talk about what SMM really is, what it can do well for your company and the downsides to it.

First of all, SMM can do great things for your company, but it certainly shouldn’t be used as a substitute for other marketing channels. SMM is normally just a “buzz” that might end just as fast as it started. I will write more about this later in the article.

What makes SMM good?

• It can send you large amounts of traffic in a short period of time.
• It enables users (possible customers) to share information (your product) faster than ever before to the masses.
• You might receive several thousand backlinks to your product if your SMM get “the buzz”. This can also improve your SEO.
• It enables the product to get out there quicker than ever before.

Downsides to SMM

• There is no guarantee to success since it often lies in the hand of others. You will need to actually create something good for SMM to work.
• It often requires a lot of work and time to research and create a good SMM campaign.
• SMM campaigns from big companies might appear like spam.
• The process of getting involved in all the different social communities is a very time consuming job, and it’s often very hard to show the results to your clients.

SMM and SEO working together

A good SMM campaign is normally very good for your SEO also. Social Media marketing and SEO compliments each other in a way. I’m not saying that these two sectors can’t be sold as different campaigns, but an SMM campaign can be a very good start for your SEO campaign.

So how does really SMM help your SEO?

Easy. If you manage to create a buzz around whatever your promoting, people will write about it. People will write about it in their blogs, in forums and their homepages. You might even get your SMM campaign picked up by bigger news papers and magazines. And for every little entry you get, you’ll have an extra backlink to your product. The more natural and quality backlinks you get, the higher you will rank in the search engines for your niches keywords.

In conclusion, SMM can do great things for your company, but it still won’t replace making your site more attractive to your users trough a good design and usability, unique titles, setting up a nice internal linking structure and cleaning up those duplicate pages. Don’t rely only on SMM.