Sohaib Thiab – The Story of an Internet Entrepreneur

So what is social media marketing, we’ve all been hearing about social media marketing online, in seminars and in the tech community, this article aims to shed some light on what social media marketing is, its benefits for business and dive into some of its details.

1^st of all and in order to understand how to market through social media, we need to understand what social media is? Social media enables communities to communicate and share interests effectively, they share their passions, common interests, products and brands they love (or hate), photos and videos, political opinions etc.

For those of you who are not familiar how big social media is (I doubt anyone reading this blog doesn’t know it) but ill give you a few quick statistics to get the picture:

• There are more than 400 million active users on Facebook worldwide.
• There are over 160 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups and events) on Facebook
• 100 million visitors to Youtube every month and 5 billion videos streams monthly.
• Over 100 million registered users on Twitter and 300,000 new users are signing up each day!
• 55 million new tweets each day and 3 billion requests on the Twitter API daily.

The best way in my opinion to explain what is social media, and instead of giving out random examples lets categorize social media sites in 4 main categories.

Social Bookmarking, websites in this category allow their users to bookmark websites and pages they like and share them with the community, sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon are the most popular sites in this category.

Social Networks, such as Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Bebo and Hi5 are amongst the most popular social networks of Today, there are many sub categories that fall under social networks such as professional social networks like LinkedIn.

Blogs, blogs are online journals, probably one of the most famous form of social media, this site for example is a blog.

Social Sharing, sites like Youtube, Flickr allows you to upload videos and images and share them with your friends and the huge community residing in those websites.

Social News, sites in this category allows you to share news articles, vote them up and down, sites like Digg and Sphinn fall in this category.

So what are the benefits of engaging in the different social media sites? Or in other words why should you or your business get into marketing through social media sites?

To answer that question and to shed some light to the endless benefits of social media marketing , I thought of sharing some more facts and numbers with you:

1. The most credible source for information about a brand on social networks is a consumer; social networks have reached 940 million people.
2. Online Moms doing product research put their faith in descriptions from consumers nearly 12 times more. Emarketer. http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007509
3. Most companies know that the best feedback they get is from their consumers.
4. 45% of adult internet users have created content online.

Can you imagine the benefits for your business when you tap into this space of social media? Pepsi for example cancelled their usual super bowl sponsorship and shifted their budget to social media, with bigger returns. SocialMediaInfluence

Some of the benefits you can get from social media marketing is getting a real feel of what your consumers think of your brand, your brand’s awareness and reputation and it gets you closer to your consumers and their needs and allows you to support and help them more easily and more cost effectively.

Lets give an example of what some of the big companies have done in social media marketing to better illustrate the benefits.

Siemens Youtube Channel

As you can see the page is now branded for information about the company and South Africa (world cup) the channel has 987 subscribers.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/siemens

Ikea Facebook Fan group

Link: http://www.dell.com/html/global/topics/sl/index.html

Image credit: istockphoto