Cheow Yu Yuan asked:


Facebook, a social networking site which has recently shot to stardom on the Internet, is a great channel for marketers to leverage on. As of this writing, it has an Alexa ranking of 7 and a PageRank (PR) of 8. This shows that Facebook is one of the most popular sites, with tons of traffic and potential.

So what makes Facebook became one of the best places to market on the Internet? Facebook is very different from other social networking sites like MySpace or Friendster. One of the major differences is that it is an open platform for application developers to post their applications on it. The best part is that applications can viral easily on Facebook, reaching out to millions of members worldwide.

Initially when I just joined Facebook, I was quite irritated by the amount of “application spams” that I have received from my friends asking me to add the whole list of applications. But after sometime, I actually gave in and added the applications. To my surprise, some of these applications are really very interesting and prompted me to add more so as to explore them.

From this experience, I realised that Facebook has actually became one of the best platform for viral marketing, using applications such as games, quiz, groups, etc. When you are invited by your friends to join a certain group or add a certain games, you will be more receptive to do so. Although there will be rejections at the beginning, but after some persistent effort from your friends, you will eventually add them, because it is free after all!

One very interesting thing that I will like to share is that once you have added a certain application, it will be shown on your profile page. Do you know that marketers should take note of this opportunity to market their products or services? Take for example, there is a game called “PetrolHead”. It is a game whereby you can buy a car with points and race with your friends to earn more points. With more points, you will be able to get better cars. Eventually you will be able to get into the billionaire clubs and get cars like Ferrari, Lamborghini, etc.

Naturally a person will want things to look good on his or her profile page, just like putting up a nice photo. So by displaying the car on your profile page, you will at least try your best to get a better car every time. The key here is that if you want to get a better car, you need points. To get points, you can either race a limited 10 times per day, or to invite more friends to join this game too. Once you have finished up your races, do you think that you will invite some friends to join this game so as to earn more points to buy a Ferrari?

Facebook is a platform that is ideal for easy viral marketing. This explains why it is so valuable to businesses and marketers to leverage on it and marketing their products or services on it.

Brad Lombardo asked:


The world of search and website marketing has really changed over just the past few years. For many in search, it seems like it was not too long ago that webmasters could have their sites ranking highly on search engines for certain keywords if they took care of the basic tags meta and description.

Times have changed since then, of course, as there is so much competition in search that now webmasters have to apply extensive search engine optimization and search engine marketing strategies on their sites, in order to get them to rank highly for their keywords across the engines. Video submissions to such venues as You Tube and Meta Caf have recently become staples in all SEO and SEM work.

Social Media Marketing is a relatively new and powerful website marketing tool, and involves increasing a sites online exposure, across the numerous Social Community Websites and Networks that are now out there. This increased exposure also involves getting people on these sites and networks to discuss that particular site, as well as its products and/or services, so that a dynamic viral marketing effect is created.

Social Media sites include such popular venues as Amazon, Craigs List, Digg, Ebay, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, Google, Live Journal, My Space, Orkut, Twitter and Yahoo. Adept webmasters or SEO people can access these social media communities, and collect relevant data on user behavior and interests, so that they can find out what customers really want.

Social Media Marketing involves several tactics and strategies, including the following:

Submission of the website to all major Social Media Networks and Websites In-house production of promotional video for the site, and submission of the video to www.youtube.com. The videos listing on You Tube is also optimized, and placed on top of the sites ranking lists, thereby ensuring maximum exposure Optimization of the video across major search engines, with frequent engine-indexing Creation of community and friendship groups on Facebook, Friendster and Twitter, with subsequent recruitment of people from around the world who are interested in the Streaming Community Participation in various forums on Community Networking, with the client site introduced to online visitors through Streaming Community Websites Submissions of site articles, newsletters and press releases to several submissions websites Submission of the sites listing to Live Journal Employment of MSN Messenger as a full-fledged website marketing tool, to inform the cyber world about the site Strategic submission of site-related pictures to Flickr, so that visitors notice these submitted materials Creation of relevant site blogs, with these blogs indexed by Google

Webmasters and SEO Consultants working on a site can effectively complement their SEO and SEM work with these types of Social Media Marketing strategies, further empowering that site to significantly increase its online presence, attract more relevant traffic, and ramp up online conversions.