April 17th, 2010 by Nick

Social media marketing (SMM) is a tricky SEO component to master. What constitutes an appropriate strategy will relate to the specific features of an online firm and its site. Nevertheless, it is possible to come up with some points that have some level of general applicability. A central point, which will be elaborated, is that it may be counterproductive for a firm to engage in SMM in a casual manner. There are several reasons why this can lead to business own goals and the missing of valuable opportunities.

The social networking media are composed of a diverse set of platforms, each with their own formal and informal rules of conduct. Using them to market goods or services through search engine optimisation with any prospect of success necessitates a degree of subtlety and considerable savoir faire. If these capacities are lacking, then it is more than possible that the SMM will come over as crude and potential customers will be alienated. Even worse, the damage which has been sustained may have had a negative impact on the brand concerned.

It is also the case that the social media are engaged in an intense global competition for market share. This means that a practitioner of SMM must be fully cognisant of all the ongoing changes which are constantly occurring. Particularly if the budget is limited, it may be necessary to select which of the social media should be used for the campaign. Selection will depend in part on the type of firm to be promoted, but it would be foolish to be ignorant of the current state of play as regards Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, for example.

There is a lot of information about SMM out there, but the casual researcher will find it hard to separate the shrewd advice from the less astute tips. Such a researcher may be unable to perceive that an alleged and self-appointed SMM guru has little to say except platitudinous commonplaces, whereas someone with greater experience and knowledge would discern this truth more easily. It can be hard, when starting out with search engine optimisation in general, to assimilate sufficient knowledge to avoid making some quite elementary blunders. The possibility of errors is compounded when a platform like Twitter adjusts its modus operandi, for instance. Such developments can pass the ill-informed individual by, sometimes with significant costs.

When the social media first burst on to the scene, not all the potential SMM players were adequately prepared for its challenges. In their rush to exploit the possibilities that were becoming available, some of them pursued strategies that were essentially suboptimal. In the light of this, many people learnt a lot of lessons and refined their techniques. People who engage in SMM in an unfocused way cannot hope to benefit from these valuable lessons.

In other words, those who fail to learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat it, as the saying goes. Almost all individuals who do not heed the advice of experts in SMM, or act independently without sufficient preparation, are basically headed towards failure at a considerable speed.

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