The use of traditional forms of advertising and product marketing platforms, such as newspapers, magazines and television, is slowly on the decline. It is evident that an increasing number of businesses are turning to the internet for promotional needs, for the simple reason of cost effectiveness gained from the enormous reach of web based advertising coupled with reasonably priced advertising solutions.

In a further advancement of online promotion several brand name businesses have ventured into social media marketing (SMM). It is such a pioneering aspect of promotion that businesses are not entirely sure of the best way of using SMM. This was most recently demonstrated by the Mars relaunch of its candy brand Skittles.

Essentially, in its original form, the Skittles website allowed a real time uncensored feed from posts on Twitter (a post would have to include the hash tag #skittles to be fed to the site). This novel yet somewhat naive venture into social marketing had, perhaps predictably, disastrous results. Many Twitter users abused the idea by feeding obscene / derogatory posts or by submitting promotions to their own products. Mars quickly changed the format of the site and, after some morphing, it now appears to be a YouTube.com driven site. So Mars initially made a mistake, but how does all this apply to the internet marketer.

Basically, the average online marketer could take advantage of the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the like. These are free to join sites and are, generally speaking, very user friendly. Another tool that is becoming the norm is the use of video and audio on websites and blogs. So how does the online marketer go about generating visitors to monetized websites or blogs using social networking sites. Perhaps Jack Humphrey’s excellent article The 90-10 Rule for Successful Twitter Networking should be used as a guide. Jack basically advocates making 90% of your content value related and just 10% as promotional content (although Twitter specific, this article should be a guide for all social network marketing). This makes sense if one gives more than a passing acknowledgement to the term social networking (a self-explanatory term if one thinks about it). After all, you would not wish to be bracketed with a group comprising cold-calling telemarketers or in your face door-to-door salespeople.

So is social marketing the way to go? Well, clearly it is an area worth exploring and testing. Whilst methods of effective social networking promotion are still being developed, particularly on the limited Twitter platform, it is possible that these methods will, sooner rather than later, become extremely effective and the internet marketer would be wise exploring the possibilities now or be prepared to play catch up later.