Social Media Marketing

Forrester is telling the world that Facebook fans are more likely to recommend, consider, and purchase from you than non-fans.

iMedia has some great examples of highly experimental but extremely successful social media campaigns carried out by some big brand names. Although these are some grand-scale endeavors, any small business can adapt tactics as it fits their business objectives and personality. Check out the highlights:

The numbers show that Facebook is second only to Google when it comes to traffic rankings – social media sites are where people congregate online. Claim your name across multiple social networks to keep fans and followers updated on your latest industry news, special offers, internal developments, new products and accomplishments.

The modern medium of online journalism, reporting with multimedia means hitting the web with interactive means of communication – video, images, audio and text. Most sites have built-in blogs – another page on your site developed and designed to match your needs. Stone can provide customization and maintenance of your company or organization’s blog according to your objectives.

Tumblr is the slightly lesser known hybrid of Twitter and WordPress (or any other complex blogging platform). With all the capabilities of a blog but with a much more simple, attractive Web 2.0  WYSIWYG editor interface - or straight up HTML if you choose - this social media network caters to the needs of a time-crunched modern-day online user.

What are people looking for on different networks? Online advertising network Chitika, set out to analyze the interests of MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Digg users by comparing the genres of sites that receive traffic from these social networks. 287,090 impressions were used in the report, and based on this research, each social site has a distinct makeup of users with unique tastes.

AdAge.com goes international reporting on the latest phenomenon to take in India. The service is called Bubbly – a 30 second or so long voice recording service. Bubbly works a lot like Twitter. People sign up to follow a friend, family member or celebrity, brand or company. It’s free to post messages and follow people. After a new message is sent out, users get alerts and pay for airtime if they choose to listen.

The explosive growth of social networking sites in the past few years has led to quite a bit of clutter, and people are starting to notice. Whether you choose to go on a manual de-friending spree on Facebook, or use a tool like UnTweeps to ax followers on Twitter, you aren't alone...

Social media can be a fantastic marketing medium to keep in touch frequently with your website audience and notify them in a timely fashion of important updates. But, how do you find the time? Here are some ideas to help...