Sunday, July 18, 2010

Understanding the Viral Marketing Power of Social Media

If you want to enjoy the benefits of viral marketing, you'll need to incorporate social media into your online marketing strategy. That's why it's a great idea to distribute your news releases through a PR service that includes embedded social media sharing buttons on each published document. After all, making your content easy for readers to share is one of the most effective viral marketing techniques that any business can use.

Understanding the Impact of Social Media

There are several reasons that social media have such a tremendous capacity to be effective. A few of the most powerful benefits of this type of online marketing include:

* Sheer numbers: A majority of consumers actively participate in social networking activities on a daily basis.
* Speed: Information distributed through social media outlets tends to travel from person to person very quickly.
* Credibility: Since people typically only to let individuals they trust into their social networking contact lists, it stands to reason that information passed through these channels is thought to have a certain level of credibility.
* Captive Audience: People who participate in social networking sites are there because they choose to be there. When your messages are presented in this way, they're being delivered directly to the desktops (or laptops or mobile phones) of a captive audience.
* Information Seeking: People who actively engage in social networking tend to utilize the sites and groups they participate in as resources for giving and receiving information. Social networkers who find useful information like to share it with their online contacts, and they also like to seek tips and suggestions from the individuals they network with in cyberspace.
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