Forms of social media

Social media comes in different forms and can easily be misinterpreted to be Viral Marketing. Although viral marketing is an ideal tool to obtain popularity within a social medium it is not SMM. Examples of social media can be sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Flickr and Facebook.

The best and easiest way to look at social media is to realize that it is tools that make it a simple process for visitors to share and "broadcast" your content. This is what makes these sites different. Facebook makes this process so simple that it is something to admire. What prevents you to incorporate the functionality of requesting someone if they wish to invite their friends listed in MSN to join the site to? The user is also not limited to choosing all or nothing. They can actually deselect those that they wish not to invite or they can simply skip the invitation process completely.

Social Media Optimization is a very important part of any web site to consider adding. The power of friends knowing friends is the by far the most powerful marketing technique that anyone can utilize in their marketing strategy.

Youtube is another excellent example where they allow visitors to play their videos on their web sites with little trouble. Next to every video within Youtube there is code located that a user can simply copy and past within their own web site and this will automatically display the video there. It is a simple user friendly way of sharing content, but done in a way that allows Youtube to obtain brand recognition and get natural traffic.

You can view this in a way that might even be simpler. How much do you pay to have a banner add on a web site. How much does Youtube pay to have their abanner on thousands of web site all over the Internet?