Friday, December 7, 2007

Marketing on Social Media Sites

iMedia http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/17505.asp has a good overview today on the value of marketing your business using the top social networking sites. Of course, it remains to be seen how effective this type of marketing is... but if you can tightly target your audience on one of these sites, then it sure can be cost-effective!

- Google's Open Social http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/. This isn't a stand-alone networking site like the next two. Rather, it is a programming code that developers can use to develop gadgets and widgets which can then easily be made available to networkers to add to their pages on sites such as MySpace. (at least that's my elementary take and I'm definitely not a developer or programmer)

- MySpace (self-service targeted ads). I didn't look too hard because I truly detest MySpace (too hard to navigate) but I can't find this advertising service anywhere on the site.

- Facebook (ads, beacon and pages http://www.facebook.com/business/). I created a Business page for TrainingPeaks http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=7267988635, we'll see what kind of traction it gets. I'm afraid to use Beacon after all the bad press it has received the last couple weeks (privacy issues). And the ads might be a good idea but not for general promotion. I would say they may work targeting a specific campaign.

Lesson learned: Doesn't hurt to put content on social networking sites. And if you have the time and money to invest, try some advertising. But whatever you do try to see your profile and ads from the user's perspective and do your best to not piss them off.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Awesome post about social media marketing. Social media marketing can help you to reach your product or services to the audience and help you to know what they think about your product or services and what they want. Social media marketing and branding for business