Never Ending Thoughts…

Social Media Marketing has become an integral part of any web campaign. In fact it’s striking to see that it took over two decades for Social Media Marketing to catch on the Web. It has been there ever since, through conferences, meet-ups, focus groups, etc.

In this article I’d like to talk about two great technology tools that has changed the way Social Media Marketing started on the Web. These are the Twitter Sharing Button and Social Bookmarking Sites. Both these technologies started at almost the same time and greatly complement each other. If carefully used together, they can help you create a great viral campaign within minutes!

Social Bookmarking

The concept behind social bookmarking is really very simple. You probably are aware of bookmarks in FireFox, IE, and other browsers. People bookmark their favorite websites and pages in their browsers so that they can quickly come back and have a look. Social bookmarking gives a more “social” angle to it. Instead of bookmarking in your local browser, social bookmarking allows you to manage all your bookmarks from a single website. This way you can access your bookmarks from anywhere! In addition, you can follow other users and stories and share your bookmarks. This is an excellent way to spread some information, share a link with others, and gain knowledge in the topics you like!

Social bookmarking really became a “must have” in the Social Marketing space when companies realized how important it was for them to be discussed by various users on a bookmarking site. The more users on a bookmarking site were sharing and bookmarking a company’s news, the better it was to be able to reach out to more visitors. As companies realized this immense potential of social bookmarking, they started paying more attention and looking at trends of what gets shared and what quickly spreads, and what just dies out.

Today there are hundreds of thousands of social bookmarking sites. So you must first find out the bookmarking sites that are relevant to you; where your visitors go and would possibly share your posts or links with their friends. Once you have done that, you must closely monitor the activity and see how users react to the information you release, at what time are you able to create the maximum impact, what gets shared more, etc. Remember, Social Bookmarking is Not Web Directory Submission. If you will just add a link there it will get buried under the thousands of new links that get added to a social bookmarking site. So instead of wasting time adding links to hundreds of social bookmarking sites, simply pick the ones that are relevant to your business and post relevant content.

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Twitter Sharing Button

Twitter Sharing Button is another marvelous tool in the hands of a Social Media Marketer. Unlike bookmarking, the sharing button allows throwing a quick tweet on your twitter home wall. From there it further percolates to your twitter followers and to their followers (if they re-tweet it) and so on. The important difference here is that Twitter is Not a Social Bookmarking Site. It is only a medium to quickly share some information with others; something that you’d probably not go back and search for in your twitter account. It’s typical use is to spread some real time information quickly amongst your “Twitter followers”.

Business use Twitter Sharing Button in their blogs to allow readers to quickly share the blog or a post with their followers. This is an excellent way to quickly spread some information and has become a default tool in the hands of marketing managers.

Using Twitter Sharing Button along with Social Bookmarking

Using Twitter Sharing Button along with great Social Bookmarking can create a lot of marketing buzz for your business, sometimes even for free! Imagine this: You post a great blog and book mark it so that your friends view and like it and book mark it too. In addition you put a Twitter Sharing Button on your post. This way, the readers who like it quickly share it with their other Twitter Friends. When the friends read it, they book mark it on their preferred social bookmarking sites and that way your post not even spreads within hours, at the same time it’s gets persisted and bookmarked by more people than you could ever do with a limited budget. Think about it!