As social networking industry is booming small business owners are looking it as a low cost marketing platform. Small businesses are considering social media as a medium to sell or resale their products.There are three simple but effective ways by which small business owners can market their products in the social media.

1. Communicate with your Customers

Marketing is all about creating and maintaining new relationship and a relationship is all about maintaining communication. So from here we can understand that communication is the most important steps to success in social media marketing.

Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn allows business owners to market their products. Other web tools like podcasting (BlogTalkRadio), event coordination (Meetup), photo sharing (photobucket, Flickr), wikis (Wikipedia, answers.com), video distribution (YouTube, Metacafe) allow small business owners to share information directly with their customers.

Contents in the form of blog post, video or audio, review or comparison, social network message or tweets help to share information and guide the customers in a less formal way.

This approach builds like and trust factor between the business owners and the customers. Features like targeted viewers allow business owners to market their product to customers based on their location, gender or interests. Facebook sports this feature.

Social media’s direct communication feature helps business owners to communicate to their target customers. Social networks has made it possible for the customers to give feedback about their experience regarding the products. This feedback helps the business owners to improve their product.

2. Collaboration boost customer-owner relationship

When small businesses communicate with their target customers, they feel powerful. When the target consumers feel powerful they buy from you, trust you and stay in touch with you. It is the consumers in this era (of media marketing) who make, break or shape purchase patterns.

Small businesses create communities or join already created communities to ignite the company-consumer collaboration. These communities bring their target customers nearer to them and in turn increase their percentage of sale. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter etc. serves this purpose.

Consumers trust social networks more than the companies itself as they rely on peers other than adverts. Social collaboration has become important to boost sales and popularity of a product.

3. Entertainment attracts less interest customers

Have you ever thought why social media serves as a marketing tool? No? I’ll tell you why. Social networks are fun and full of entertainment. Small businesses market their products by entertaining the consumers. People choose the place where they feel they are being listened to and enjoy themselves.

Social networking giant Facebook, serves as an entertaining market by featuring Facebook likes or fan pages. Amount of like shows a company’s popularity (not always). Other social media sites like Twitter attracts small businesses to market their product as they too have entertaining value.

Always remember to blend your product marketing with the social media tools. Try to post some relevant videos with some humorous title. Entertainment is an important mantra for social marketing.

Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are becoming business owners interests as they are fast, entertaining, fun and not to mention very popular.

So what will be your company’s strategy when it comes to marketing on social media?

Social Bookmarking has played a major role in reducing the labor all surfers used to face while trying to remember their preferred locations and also to channel targeted traffic onto their domain.

Due to the enormity of cyberspace, the social bookmarking mechanism has proven its worth by making it effortless for Web users to not only remembering their favorite Web page or website in order to diminish the time spent on searching for them, but also to share these bookmarked Web pages and websites to other Internet users in for mutual benefits.

Social bookmarking system basically allows Internet users registered at social bookmarking websites to recognize sites related to their interests or search and discover fresh assets that fall under a particular class where the user enjoys niche.

Although social bookmarking has a lot of advantages to offer different Internet users yet it also has a certain disadvantages to its credit such as:

1. One of the major drawbacks related to social bookmarking is associated with its tagging system. The Tag based system does not follow any particular standard. There is no restriction in the application of keywords, controlled terminology and of course the standard of the vocabulary used.

2. Other than these problems, social bookmarking is also vulnerable to corruption and conspiracy due to its popularity. Often the traffic is guided onto a particular domain solely on the basis of sales commitments, by the application of certain false declarations and appeals. The prospects within such traffic usually loose their faith in the overall market strategies and may loose interest in the product itself.

3. Social Marketing plans take time to mature. Hence the dealers need to have a high degree of patience while committing to such a strategy.

4. The internet is littered with spam marketing schemes, and you have to toil hard to keep yourself out of such schemes. In case of social bookmarking, it becomes even more difficult, due to the redirection capabilities of certain Spam bots, as a result of which even you may be in risk of getting black listed as a Spammer.