Social Media Marketing
A Powerful Weapon for Small Business Marketing

Social media marketing is really the new buzz word around in the online world. However, in the offline world, most would ask,"What's that? Never heard of it in Asia." At least that was MY response when I first came across this term!

So What Exactly Is It?

According to Wikipedia,

"Social Media Marketing is a form of internet marketing which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks."
To put it simply, humans are social creatures. Wherever humans go in the real world, they socialize and form networks for a variety of purposes, be it for pleasure and for business.

So when internet came along, humans went online and being social creatures, humans start socializing online and forming networks online. And as with the real world, some of these online social networks can be formed to achieve certain business goals. These platforms where humans socialize with each other are collectively called "Social Media".

Newspapers, TV and Radio
VS
Blogs, YouTube and Podcasts

In the real world, "social media" take the form of newspapers, TV channels and radio stations. In the online world, they take the form of Blog articles, YouTube videos and Podcast audios.

But the similarity ends here.

With the internet, everyone now, if they choose to, can run their own online newspapers (start a blog), TV channels (start a YouTube Channel) and radio stations (record a podcast), broadcasting whatever content they like, to their own subscribers!

Check Out This Cool Video Explanation

So very simply, what all these mean to you as a small business owner is that, you can leverage on social media to do marketing activities that center around:-

Creating content on websites or blogs

Social interaction within social networking sites like Facebook

Sharing videos on YouTube

Bookmarking and sharing interesting articles on social bookmarking sites....

You can get the word out at a faster speed, at a lower cost than traditional offline social media. It's really about leveraging on all these online socializing platforms (social media) to help spread the word, whatever that word may be!