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Los Angeles Social Media Marketing Report Card for Corporate

By Kristin Gabriel

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 16Apr2010 Word count: 560 Viewed: 321 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

I recently found a survey that determined most businesses are still only experimenting with social media marketing. That's why it seems worth paying attention to how some big and successful brands use it in their own strategies.

It would appear that about two-thirds of companies who took this survey said the amount of money they spent on social media has increased since last year; 30 percent said it has stayed the same, while 81 percent of these companies expect their budgets to increase in the near future.

Social media marketing among businesses - both large and small - has grown over the past two years, no doubt, however the survey reveals that most businesses are largely still in the experimental stages when it comes to their social media marketing strategies. The statistics reveal businesses are starting to get to the place where they view social media as crucial, however. About 90 percent of those surveyed said they expect social media to take up more time in-house over the next year or two.

What is social media marketing? It includes all the online technologies and practices that people use to share ideas, opinions insights, experiences and perspectives with other people online. Social media technology includes a number of online communications hubs driven by users: Internet message boards, blogs, podcasts, wikis, and videos. There's also vlogs, wall-postings, picture- and music-sharing sites -- all online social networks including Twitter and Facebook, for communities of people sharing interests, from pets to puberty.

Social networks were only beginning to gain traction in the spring of 2007. Now the memberships are in the multi-millions and social media is still growing exponentially. Facebook was at more than 300 million users

Another recent report states that 85 percent of companies surveyed use Facebook as part of their marketing strategy. There are also social networking and video sharing places like You Tube and Google video, virtual reality sites such as Second Life, Last.fm and iTunes for personal music, Flickr to share your photos and micro blogs like Pownce or Twitter.

Social media is all about being social so new media marketers must have a social media strategy for each and every client, with specific tactics for getting involved and having two way conversations with their customers online. And social media also affords the opportunity to create pages that provide links back to your website, for inbound traffic and links that enhance search engine optimization (SEO). When you write unique content and then embed with your key words the search engines can track it, rank your website and then when people search online, they will have a better chance of finding your content.

If a page ranks well in the search engines, it will help people to find your company via specific key words and phrases, and your company will be listed on the first pages of Google. Hopefully above the fold.

Building traffic on the social media sites to attract attention to your company is also a good social media marketing tactic. Article publishing, electronic press releases, blogs, directories, text linking - these are all social media tactics.

When you write unique content and then embed with your key words the search engines can track it, ranks your website and then when people search online, they will have a better chance of finding your content.

(Source: E-Consultancy and the Online Marketing Summit, and Nielsen),

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