Social Media Marketing – Where’s the Value?

There’s been a lot of hype over the last couple of months about all of these new social networking sites and their “Web 2.0 features”.   Suddenly terms like “Social Media Optimization” (SMO) and “Social Media Marketing” (SMM) are being used to describe the actions of optimizing and marketing through the social networks like MySpace, Facebook, social bookmarking like Digg, Reddit, De.licio.us, Furl, Bluedot and Diigo.

After many discussion about the value of optimizing and marketing in these areas of the web, some simplification conclusion were made to lumped all this into search engine activity.   while other are questioning the value of these networks and services, and how do you measure their worth?

How to value social networking?

Unlike paid Per Click (PPC), there isn’t a direct correlation with a visit to purchase ratio since PPC is more of the instantaneous type of marketing where you put up an ad, and within a couple of hour, you can start to see some results. Social networking rely on others within the network to find it and “pass it along” of which you understand this as – viral marketing.

Based on this, I had run an experiment to see how they perform and this is my finding (bearing in mind, this is not just focuse on one network):

1. Older posts get hits from the book-marking. services through the searches, it is like the users of the book-marking services are relying more on what other people have found “worthy” or “relevant” to bookmark and finding articles, websites and information that more fit their searches.
2. Visitors coming through the social book-marking services have a longer stay time on the blog.
3. The visitors seem to know more about search engine optimization or social media as compared to normal surfer.  Although this is just in the beginning and the method a bit crude but judging from the test done from a blog not a commerce sites that should make thing more clear and stand out.

So again what’s the value of social media marketing? Perhaps there is more value to websites that have a lot of consumer generated content – like blogs, or commerce sites with blogs attached, than just the static website that hardly changes.

Perhaps you think other wise and like to add you own opinion.  While you’re here, please promote this article in your own way and also give me a Thumbs up! on stumbeupon if you like this article and want others to read it too.

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