Social Media is a phrase that is being tossed around a lot today – and you just can’t miss it. And it is no more a kid stuff. With businesses getting hold of the Internet, big time, Social Media marketing provides businesses a tremendous opportunity to connect with potential customers.

Social Media gives a tremendous advantage to corporates by allowing users to get and “share” usefulinformation of their activities, besidesenticing them to interact. These interactions can be as simple as comments left on a blog or product recommendations based on ratings from people with similar interests. Using social media to market your business is all about conversing with your customers.

Benefits

It goes without saying that Social Media offernumerous benefits,mostlyfocusing on brand awareness, direct customer communication and feedback. Social Media is all about connecting to customers and not meant to be a hard sell. The idea is that more the connection to your social media, there is more scope in people buying your product or service. Some potential benefits include:

• brand recognition and exposure,
• increased traffic to your website,
• identification of new partnerships,
• increased rank in web-based searches,
• new marketing leads, and,
• reduced marketing expenses.

Some common Social Media websites

• Social Bookmarking. (Del.icio.us, Blinklist, Simpy) Interact by tagging websites and searching through websites bookmarked by other people.
• Social News. (Digg, Propeller, Reddit) Interact by voting for articles and commenting on them.
• Social Networking. (Facebook, Hi5, Last.FM) Interact by adding friends, customers, commenting on profiles, joining groups and having discussions.
• Social Photo and Video Sharing. (YouTube, Flickr) Interact by sharing photos or videos and commenting on user submissions.
• Wikis. (Wikipedia, Wikia) Interact by adding articles and editing existing articles.

Note that these websites are not the only social media websites. Any website that invites you to interact with the site and with other visitors falls into the definition of social media.

TROPPUS for Social Media Marketing

TROPPUS is a professional website support company. As a part of our support activities, we create an online identity for your business by creating the profiles in all major Social Media websites.

• We build a marketing strategy that includes email, rather than one that focuses solely on social media.
• We build campaigns rather than just emails and posts. It's imperative to tie everything together. For example, a Face book post should support an email campaign and vice versa.
• We connect your social sites to email so that it's easier for your customers and prospects to connect with your company in the way they prefer.
• We find what your audience wants and responds to. We give them that content and experience, thus remaining relevant to them.
• We create a great customer experience—by creating a good experience, social media will reward you, but if you're creating a bad one, it will kill you.