SMM or Social Media Marketing is all about engaging with the community on the topic that you can help them with. Be this product advice, service support, or general community support, the aim is to create a buzz within your community. This helps to build your reputation in your industry as you are actively involved and it also gives you more exposure and therefore more visitors to your website and has the additional feature of having more people link to your site in a natural manner.

Facebook is a great example of a Social Media Marketing site – one which continues to grow in popularity. 

Clear The Air, a charity group that I have worked with for the past 3 years have had great success by starting up their own facebook group.  In response to increasing air pollution in Hong Kong, they are committed to the introduction and implementation of measures to significantly reduce air pollution in Hong Kong. By engaging with the community in Hong Kong through facebook they have increased their own paid membership (through donations) as well as building their facebook members to over 1000 people. This is a large step for such a small organization and has led them to increasing their membership to include corporate members as a result.

Other popular Social Media sites are Blogs (such as this one), of which Clear The Air have also benefitted from. Blogs reach your community through articles you release to engage your visitors to come back to your site and keep up to date via RSS feeds and you may also have them participate in leaving comments on your blogs to encourage user participation which creates a buzz and some healthy debate. Clear The Air have further increased their visitor numbers through their News Blog, Energy Blog and Tobacco Blogs significantly. In fact after implementing these three blogs as well as the facebook group, visitors to the website have increased by over  400%.

After implementing such social media sites however, one major shortfall is that most people do not continue to participate within their own community and things start to become stale. It is important to continue updating information and engaging community support through events, activities and promotions in order to continue to build a network of people who are actively involved in whatever it is that you are trying to help them out with.

However, when actively participating in Social Media Marketing, it is important not to promote your product or service 100% of the time. In fact the less you do that, the better. What you need to do is help out your visitors by providing with information they don’t normally receive during a sales pitch or the like. You can discuss advantages and disadvantages of something, provide support and basic information, provide tips and hints, offer alternative solutions even if those solutions are not your product or service – bring up your service or product as a solution only when it is highly relevant to the topic being discussed. In the initial stages of building a social media marketing site you may not want to promote your services that much at all in order to build up trust within your community that you are not just out to make a quick buck like all those other sites, but that you actually care and wish to help your visitors. Many blogs do just that and may be running ad free for up to a year to create a buzz and build visitor numbers to a peak before placing ads on their site to earn any type of revenue.

As well as creating your own social media sites, it is also important to scan the web to find potential review sites that chat about your products or services. This can be of great importance to you as you can get an idea of what people are saying about your products or services and you can actively do something about it – and then you can chat about it yourself with your own community to gain valuable feedback of how you can improve your product or service and therefore your reputation. Many companies have no idea what is being said about their products or services online. This is highly valuable information and can either make you or break you. If you are seen to be actively involved in your niche and actually listen to both the good reviews as well as the bad (which are also good), you will be viewed in a different light to most companies who are all about selling rather than listening.

Social Media Marketing is the latest trend in communicating with your community and if you are not actively involved you are just another brick and mortar store without a clue about where your business is headed.