Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a form of online marketing which seeks to achieve branding, marketing communication goals, online sales inquires and traffic on site through the participation in various social media site networks such as Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Dailymotion, YouTube, Hi5, Gather.com, orkut, social web applications (webapps) such as reddit, Digg, Squidoo, Last.fm, Stumbleupon, Flickr, iLike, Wikipedia, Twitter, ePinions, Eventful and others as well as within 3D virtual worlds such as ActiveWorlds, Moove, Second Life and There.com. The goals of each Social Media Marketing (SMM) program or campaign will differ for every organization or business, however most will involve some form of building an idea or brand awareness, increasing visibility on web, encouraging brand feedback and dialogue, enhance site traffic as well as to possibly sell a product or service. Social Media Marketing (SMM) may also include online reputation or brand management.
Social media includes websites where news, press releases, photos, blogs, videos, Rss feeds and podcasts are hosted via websites through user submission. Typically, these websites include mechanisms to allow users to vote on content which makes users submitted content more or less popular.
Most of the online communities do not welcome traditional direct or hard sell techniques so an effective Social Media Marketing (SMM) campaign will require more finesse to execute properly and generate valuable traffic in terms of sales inquires. Social Media Marketing (SMM) campaigns must be targeted to the community, customer or audience you want to reach with a message that convince or appeals to them and invites participation. Some common ways of achieving this type of marketing goals are with authoritative information, entertainment, humor or controversy.