When you promote your website or business using social media channels, the procedure is called Social media marketing. You can attract the attention of people, get links for your site and drive traffic to it – all via social media marketing. 

Usually, there are 5 major categories of social media marketing:

•  Self declaration: You can use the “About Us” section of your site or create online profiles (say, at MySpace) declaring your business, the values and vision, contact details etc. Though this form of interaction is somewhat one-sided, it can help you a bit in the marketplace.

•  Interaction via associations: You can interact with your customers via social networking (like StumbleUpon, del.icio.us etc.) and social bookmarking sites (such as Furl, Reddit, BlinkList etc.).

•  Interaction started by your users: It’s the turn of your users to offer their feedback and your chance to reply. Various forums, message boards, community sites and “groups” like Google Groups, AOL Groups, Yahoo! Groups, MSN Groups etc. belong to this category.

•  Interaction started by you: When you initiate a dialog as a provider with your customers, it can give you an insight on several aspects of your business. Ask your customers to share their opinion about your products /services, what they love about it and what’s the thing that they hate. Their feedback will help you to fine tune your products and even help you to plan the launch of some new products or services. 

•  Face-to-face interaction: Yes, it’s the oldest but the safest bet. Nothing can come close to talking in person. So, organize a gathering of your customers, talk to them, let them talk to one another and build a strong community.

So, whatever be the mode of your social media marketing, it’s worth a try because it is:

•  free or costs just a small amount
•  spans the world and grows fast
•  interactive
•  formed and developed by the user
•  even for people with no technical knowledge
•  where the future of the Internet is

Are you doing social media marketing to market your business online? If no, you are missing a great audience to market your products / services. If yes, I would love to hear your experiences.