Social Media Marketing (SMM) is the act of promoting your site, business, or blogs through social media web sites. SMM when coupled with your current or traditional advertising campaign is a very powerful tool that builds customer loyalty by way of customer contact. And most important if you are patient, diligent, and stead fast in your SMMing you will bring massive amounts of traffic to your location on the web.

SMM is still in it’s infancy stage, and there are no tried and true methods to the madness as there is in traditional marketing. Most all marketing efforts to this point are trial and error, but as things hash out in this industry some methods are starting to stand out as the “so called” standards of SMM. One thing is for sure by creating viral content and promoting it via social media, you can build a very large, loyal group of fans that keep coming back for more and bring their friends with them.

Today there are many business managers and owners that are in one of the following categories.

1. The ones that don’t know about SMM
2. The ones that have heard of it, but have no clue how to get into SMM
3. The ones that feel there is no value in SMM

No matter which category you are in, take some time to surf the web and find out as much as you can about social media. No matter if you look at small companies or large mega companies one thing they all have in common, a follow me in Twitter and FaceBook logo on their main page of their web site. From Dell to Starbucks, to the mom and pop shop up the street, everyone is finding out that customer loyalty via customer contact is building strong customer relationship.

If you are looking for return on investment (ROI), or if you are asking yourself how does social media make me money, then you are looking at social media in the wrong light. Because most companies will tell you they have not seen a direct correlation between SMM and ROI. Most companies have no real method of tracking tangible ROI in direct relation to their SMM campaigns. But to wet your appetite for information in regards to how well SMM is doing for some companies check out these facts posted in June 2009.

1. Dell Computers surpassed $3 million in sales via links from one of it’s Twitter accounts
2. Cisco Systems found 43% of visits to online support forum are in lieu of opening up a support case though the standard methods
3. Ebay found in 2006 that participants in online communities spend 54% more than non-community users.

Better customer experiences, far lower support costs and more buying activity in the long run, coupled with higher customer satisfaction is what Social Media Marketing can bring to the company that successfully implements SMM into their advertising campaign.

Just remember these few items as you try to decide on if you should use SMM or not.

1. Your customers are using it
2. Your competition is already doing it
3. Your partners are using it
4. Your web site hits are static
5. Your advertising budget is busted

Social media is a way to reliably dispense your message to a group of people who want to hear what you have to say, and want to feel included as they converse with you on the subject.