Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media marketing is a recent addition to organizations’ integrated marketing communications plans. Integrated marketing communications is a principle organizations follow to connect with their targeted markets. Integrated marketing communications coordinates the elements of the promotional mix; advertising, personal selling, public relations, publicity, direct marketing, and sales promotion.

Social media marketing programs usually center on efforts to create content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share it with their social networks. A corporate message spreads from user to user and presumably resonates because it is coming from a trusted source, as opposed to the brand or company itself.

Social media is a platform that is easily accessible to anyone with internet access, opening doors for organizations to increase their brand awareness and facilitate conversations with the customer. Additionally, social media serves as a platform for organizations to implement marketing campaigns.

How Can My Company Benefit From Social Network Marketing?
Social network marketing is an excellent way to build your brand, encourage brand loyalty, drive website traffic and generate buzz. If your organization is serious about promoting your organization online, you need to consider adding social media marketing to your overall marketing mix. Without it, you'll be missing a significant percentage of online users.

In recent years social networking websites have evolved in functionality and have grown enough in popularity to make social network marketing a viable online marketing strategy. In the past it used to be enough to make a website, optimize it for search engines, possibly purchase banner ads, google ads and or mailing lists, but now the internet marketing landscape is evolving.

This year we're seeing many organizations earmarking larger and larger percentages of their overall marketing budgets for Internet marketing. Most importantly, we're seeing social media marketing receiving a growing proportion of Internet marketing budgets.