Social Media Marketing is considered a new way of marketing that has a lot of advantages over the traditional marketing. The tremendous number of users using social network websites is a major advantage for Social Media Marketing. In other words and from a business point of view, you will publish and market for your product or service with a much bigger numbers of viewers than in the traditional marketing. Also through Social Media Marketing is used as an easy way to share feedback, thoughts and opinions with your customers. Social Media Marketing has been developed recently, as social networks were created to keep people in touch and not for marketing purposes.

The effective part in Traditional Marketing is, after doing the targeting and marketing segmentation, sending out marketing messages to a lot of people and hope the message would interest some of them. So Traditional marketing is considered as a one-way marketing (brand to customer) and it’s also brand generated. On the other side, Social Media Marketing is a multi-way marketing, (brand to customer) and (customer to customer). Also it’s a user-generated, depends on the participation of the customers.

Dairy Queen, a case study that shows how Social Media Marketing has affected the reputation, popularity and the return of investment. Dairy Queen is a leader in the soft serve and fast food restaurant industry. In May 2008, Dairy Queen had launched their Facebook Fan Page. Now they have more than 3.5 million fans, sharing their opinions and feedback about the new meals and tastes offered by the restaurant. When the Fan Page had a little more than 150,000 fans, 62% of the fans were females, and 54% of the fans were in between 18-44 years old. Such statistics help them figuring out which segment of people are the main investment for them. They also use their Twitter account to monitor their reputation, customer services and other purposes.

Another advantage for Social Media Marketing is that it spreads like wildfire, which means when a one person likes your product, service, or ad, he will share it with his friends that are already too much, this happen in a moment!

Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Hi5, Flicker and there are a lot of other websites that have more millions of registered users that you can gain from a professional page or account on these websites.

Social Media Marketing really worth time to think, prepare and launch an effective campaign for your small business.

Don’t know how to start a professional Fan Page? Our next articles will discuss each of the previously mentioned websites separately, how to create and manage a professional account and use it to get a lot of customers.

Wait for our next article.