[KingPin]

Rather than type it all out again, here is something I posted on my forum for someone who asked pretty much the same question.

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Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site/business through social channels and it can be powerful back link strategy, your site/business brand attention and massive amounts of traffic.

I can’t think of a cheaper promotional method out there that will easily give you large numbers of visitors, which will no doubt be returning visitors.

Social Media Marketing is a potent method that will make your site profitable, be it a blog (where you increase your reader base) or if you are selling a service/product. It is even great for sites that are built for AdSense so using SMM (social Media Marketing) could possibly make your site profitable.

The people who ignore the effectiveness of social media marketing mainly fall into 3 categories

1) People that don’t know much or anything about it.
2) The ones that are interested but don’t know enough use it effectively.
3) The people that don’t believe SMM can bring value to their site/business.

For the ones who don’t understand or see the value of social media sites, take a look at the benefits of creating viral content and effectively promoting them through SMM.

Creating link bait and successfully getting it popular on various social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon will increase the benefits for any site.

Primary and Secondary Traffic.

Primary traffic will be the large amount of visitors who come from social media sites. Secondary traffic is most likely going to be referral traffic from sites which link to and send you visitors, after they come fall on your content through the SB sites.

High Quality Links.

Just by being popular on sites like Digg or Reddit will get you a large amount of links, some of which may be topically relevant, and of course won’t bet. A good post/article can realistically acquire a large number of high quality editorial links, and some that literally you could not buy.

So to tie this together, the tangible benefits for you site would be...

Quality Links.

We all know quality back links will help boost you up the rankings. As I mentioned above with the editorials, they are more than likely to be on authoritive sites which in turn helps relevancy and ranking.

Primary + Secondary Traffic = Community/Supporters.

People say that SB sites only send useless traffic, visitors that will often just view a certain page and click away. You know what? Yeah, that’s true in most cases, I mean , Digg are notorious for their incredibly poor bounce rates: many visitors drop in for the article and then leave after reading it. So as you say Dan “Fire and Forget”, but saying that, StumbleUpon is far better when it comes to this.

So why you should consider using social media marketing?

It’s natural - Not only do you get natural links without any discernible pattern, your website is exposed to large groups of people in a spontaneous fashion. This differs from paid advertising which has overt commercial overtones.

It’s defensible - Once you know what you’re doing, social communities can be a great source of traffic on top of any traffic you are already receiving from the search engines. SMM traffic can be very easily controlled through strategic marketing.

High Returns for little effort - If done by you, the cost is only your time. The benefits will often exceed the cost. It would take you thousands of Pounds (Dollars/Euros/Yen/Rupees) to buy many links. Social media has the ability to give you that for free.

Complimentary - SMM and general marketing is usually community specific. It doesn’t interfere with any other methods of getting traffic to you’re site. It can and will fit perfectly with an advertising campaign targeting other sites or search engines.

I’m not an expert on SMM by any stretch of the imagination, nor do I know what the hell I’m doing half the time so I fall into category 2. I would love to learn it but don’t have the time to learn it.

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Maybe that will give you a better insight.

KP