Social media advertising can be an important tool to build your online marketing. By building an expert reputation on social media applications, you can increase your online business. However, social media advertising and social network advertising are often erroneously linked, and we need to define social media before we look at social media advertising.
What is Social Media?
Social media are interactive sites that allow users to communicate with, collaborate with, advise and question leaders in the field, usually for business-building purposes. This differs from social network sites, like Facebook, which connect you to friends in an online community for entertainment purposes.
Some examples of social media sites include PFBuzz, a finance site, and Flickr, a photography site. These sites allow users to post blogs about finance and photographs, respectively, for business advancement. PFBuzz, for example, allows users to rate blogs ("buzz" them) and communicate with bloggers, and Flickr similarly allows comments, questions and advice for posted photography.
How Can I Advertise Using Social Media?
So, now that you know what social media is, how can you use the knowledge to your advantage? You can advertise your business by becoming an expert in your field and making cyber-friends. This is a little different than traditional advertising because it takes time and patience. Let's take a look at how it's done.
Social media advertising relies entirely upon blogs and posts to build your credibility, or to advertise your expertise. To do this, it is best to connect the social media site to a blog you have posted on your website -- this will do two things: 1. It will build your rank by continually posting new blogs to your site, and 2. It will instantly give you credibility by taking viewers to your site.
After your first post to the social media site, you must continuously post new blogs to reach a broader audience. You should also start to make cyber-friends. To accomplish this, you should comment on other blogs regularly, then as you make friends, they will also comment on your blogs in return, which will make you more credible or build your rank, depending on the site, in the social media site.
Another way to make your business more credible is to write columns for highly-read social media sites, like Wikipedia or Ezine, or to answer questions on sites like EHow and Yahoo!Answers.
Obviously, building credibility in any field does not happen overnight. Traditionally, expertise takes credentials and years of work -- expert witnesses, for example, need doctorates and decades of experience. Social media experts also must prove over time that they are knowledgable in their trades by answering questions and giving sound advice. For social media advertising, this means that proving yourself as an expert on the internet -- even if you are already an expert -- takes time and patience.
To wrap up the idea of social media advertising, we can conclude that expertise does not happen overnight. Blogging, answering questions, giving advice and making cyber-friends all contribute to the lengthy process of marketing on social media sites. But, in the long run, when social media advertising helps your business reach a new level of success, you will be happy you took the time and had the patience to promote your business.