Social Media and No-Cost Internet Marketing

Internet marketing can be a large and expensive undertaking. From designing and building a website to continuing site management, costs can rack up quickly. Next you will be tasked with determining how to spread your finite promotional dollars.

This is really difficult – and I’m not going to provide a formula on how to do so. Instead, I’d like to suggest ways to use social media to drive your brand at no cost.

If you’re in the business of marketing, you know that you’ll need to communicate where your customers are “listening.” Today, people are listening to each other through social networking channels, which have no entry cost.

For example, if you have promotional or informational videos they can be posted on YouTube at no cost, you can even create your own YouTube channel devoted to your videos. If you’re feeling daring, you can allow users to comment on your content. Or disable comments if you like.

Similar to the YouTube phenomenon are social networking sites. Increasingly mainstream, these sites provide yet another avenue to create dialogue about and touch points with your brand. Marketing to professionals? Consider creating a group on Linked In. Marketing to a more mainstream audience (possibly for community outreach or fundraising)? Then you might consider developing a Facebook or YouTube Presence.

Still skeptical, consider that President Obama had 5,599,451 “supporters” linked to his Facebook page and 1,299,795 “friends” linked to his MySpace page at the time this post was written.

Now that is a lot of listening.

http://www.myspace.com/
http://www.youtube.com/

Jeff Howlett
Account Executive
Jeff works closely with eCrossings Media clients to drive their brand.