Social Networking. Social marketing has been defined as "the application of commercial marketing technologies to the analysis, planning, execution, and evaluation of programs designed to influence the voluntary behavior of target audiences in order to improve their personal welfare and that of their society”
| Website Name | Description/Focus | Registered Users | Alexa Ranking |
| Bebo | General, Popular in the US, UK, Ireland, NZ and the Pacific Islands | 40,000,000 | 108 |
| General. Popular Worldwide. | 80,000,000 | 7 | |
| MySpace | General. Popular in the United States of America, moderate popularity worldwide. | 110,000,000 | 6 |
| WAYN | Travel and lifestyle | 10,000,000 | 823 |
| Xanga | Blogs and "metro" areas | 27,000,000 | 230 |
| Netlog | Europe | ||
Social News. Social news sites are similar in concept to social bookmarking sites. With a free membership you can start submitting your articles and blog posts to news sites. These sites have a lot of traffic and can lead many users to your Website. Check out services like Digg and Reddit for more information.
Social Bookmarking. Social bookmarking sites allow users to share their favourite Websites with others over the Internet. More bookmarks to a site mean more potential links. In the context of marketing, social bookmarking sites allow your organization to post every blog entry, new Web page and article you write, and create a link to your site for each one. Companies like addthis.com offer buttons for your site that allow visitors to bookmark your site with the click of a single button.
Blogs. Each blog posting has a unique URL, or Web page address. This means that if the blog is hosted directly on your site, every blog post will create a new page on your site, giving search engines more to work with when assessing your site's relevance. To host your own blog you need a domain name, which has a monthly cost. If you host your blog elsewhere, like blogger.com, there is no charge, and you can still take advantage of link building opportunities by pointing to your own site in your posts or adding your posts to social bookmarking and news sites.
Article Marketing. Articles are not a social medium per se, but I like to include them in discussions of social media marketing anyway. Article databases, like ezinearticles.com, give you a forum for posting detailed articles (as opposed to short blog posts) that relate to your organization. Articles allow links, so you can easily connect readers to your site. You can also post your articles on your own Website to increase the content there.
Forum Marketing: Forums are online communities or gatherings of great and like minds on the Internet. Amongst so many other reasons, online communities such as forums exist to facilitate quick ways of sharing ideas, tips.
Social media marketing websites:
Twitter.com is a good one. This is where you can post a one liner on what you are doing at a particular moment. You can use it to comment on a new website that you have created or a website that you found. This is called sharing. So instead of saying, "I am online and found a real neat website," you would say, "I found this nifty website about increased web site traffic that you may need to check out at http://www.trafficsourcegenerator.com." You have to be mindful of how many characters you type. The system will let you know if it is too much.
Mybloglog.com is really fascinating. It has so many ways that you can implement. You can connect it with your current blog or create a blog and whenever you make a post on mybloglog.com, it shows up on your blog as well.
Here is a great one that will get you on the front page of Google, if you make a good post and here is the link at http://www.freeiq.com. Sign up for an account. It is free and easy. You will post a free product or a paid product that you can sell. Make sure you enter some of your keywords in your bio and in your product details. Your page will get on Google within 24 hours because this website has a high page rank.
Go to http://www.surchur.com and you will find the most popular blogs, news post and websites that are picking up a lot of traffic. Choose the link you like and go to their website and make comments if it is a blog.
OnlyWire.com: This is a social bookmarking service that allows you to submit your articles or blog posts too many social bookmarking websites at once When you create an account you'll simply need to enter the title of the post, a short description, the main keywords that describe your post (tags), and the category that it fits
Stumbleupon.com:StumbleUpon works on the same premise as OnlyWire with difference that there is also a community component so you can add friends to your account and let them see what you've been bookmarking. You can form networks of people with similar bookmarking interest, and vote on sites that have been bookmarked.
BlogCatalog.com: BlogCatalog is a social community for bloggers. It is a blog directory where you can search blogs, connect with bloggers, learn more about blogging, attract more blog readers, participate in groups and discussions, find the latest tools for your blog or promote your own blog.
Digg.com: Submitting your blog posts to Digg.com is a high and rapid way for quality traffic. You can create an account to submit your posts which are then interpret and rated by it's users. By submitting quality and helpful items you can make popularity and be promoted to the front page. Another advantage of Digg is that all information is equivalent when it is submitted. Blogs only become ranked higher by the people who vote for them.
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