Social Media Marketing is a new discipline that has established itself very quickly as a vital component of Search Engine Marketing. SMM can help with overall search efforts and social signal links but may also be used as an independent strategy.

This puts immense importance on the Twitter user who might now be recognised as a trusted and credible source and places authority on the Retweet as a new link building tool.

FirespinSEO offers SMM services and works with social bookmarking (Delicious), social news (Digg), social networking (FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter), social tagging (StumbleUpon), social answers (Wikipedia) and ratings (TripAdvisor) to maximise the marketing efforts.

Some of the benefits when using Social Media Marketing are for instance a tag on StumbleUpon or support on Digg which can bring in thousands of unique visitors in one day. This amount of traffic increases RSS subscriptions and may in some instances lead to sales. SMM may build authority of the content publisher.  For instance a link from Wikipedia drives traffic and builds authority.

SMM helps develop a network of people, such as Twitter users, who have similar interests and who may support each other in the future to build more traffic, assist with sales or spread the word. Word of mouth is one of the most important sales tools available. The spreading network also builds links which improves search engine positioning.

Social Media Marketing requires very specific understanding and expertise on how to use these sites. It is also advisable to make use of power user accounts as it is very time consuming for an enterprise or individual to build up to a power user level themselves. One mistake can destroy all the time invested in building an online reputation.

There are many benefits to social media but it is not necessarily the only weapon in the SEO marketers arsenal. One may use this marketing tool as an additional strategy or on its own.

Call on FirespinSEO for advice and a way forward when using Social Media Marketing.