Social Media Marketing

There are two separate categories for social media; social networking and social bookmarking.

Social networking is made up of sites like Myspace, Facebook, Plaxo, Bebo, LinkedIn, and now Twitter. Myspace, Plaxo, and Bebo are now populated with people aged 10-21 and 45-60. Facebook and LinkedIn are populated with people 21-35. So, depending on the demographic of your business you’d want to lean towards one of these. However, please don’t expect any leads to come through any of these social networking mediums. They are simply intended to come up in the search engine results and drive traffic to your website.

The remainder of the social media sites are probably in a category of social bookmarking. If you’ve ever bookmarked a webpage or placed it in your favorites (depending on your web browser), this is the same concept. The only difference is that social bookmarking is public, so you post your bookmarks on the web for everyone to share. For SEO, this is very important because spiders can see the amount of bookmarks for a website and take this into consideration within their algorithm. They don’t count as much for inbound links, however, because of the low page ranks.

Twitter is a new social media site that simply allows users to post updates about their life and for people to literally follow these updates. It uniquely combines both social networking and bookmarking and has the benefit of a page rank.