Social Platforms

Symmetric- (Facebook, LinkedIn)

With these types of platforms you can only interact with people you know ad who have accepted your invitation. There isn't really a possibility of one way friendships like you get with Twitter. You can however like a page on these types of sites but the interaction is not like what you would get with your friends.

Asymmetric- (Twitter, Google+)

With these types of sites you can follow people that you do not personally know. There is the possibility of one way friendships. You are able to find somebody famous on Twitter and follow them to learn more about them. Asymmetric platforms I would say are the most popular in digital marketing because people can post content that anyone can see even if they are not actually connected to that page. A company can tweet something and anyone can see it it can be retweeted and then it gets spread very quickly.

Media- (YouTube, Flickr, MySpace)

These types of sites are more focused on the media experience like a brand creating a YouTube profile to create videos that they hope have the possibility of going viral. This is the best way to get actual examples and show people using the products instead of just a picture.

Location- (Foursquare, Yelp)

As the name states these types are made up of location based user interaction. You can check in at a place and your followers can see where you are or where you have been. Businesses give out incentives to be in select locations and specific times. A business can also tell a story through the location history of your past customers.

The Benefits of Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking Loves Your Site

Social bookmarking is more than just bookmarking sites in your browser.  Instead you save your bookmarks to a public website rather than to your computer.  You can then easily share links with your friends or colleagues.  Some of the most popular social bookmarking sites include StumbleUpon and Delicious.  On StumbleUpon for example users can view bookmarks form their favorites, a friends favorites, or anyone in the StumbleUpon community.  Once you come upon a site that you really like on StumbleUpon you can share it on other sites like Facebook or Twitter, you can add it to your lists so you can come back to it later, or you can give it a thumbs up so it gets more recognition and you see more pages similar to that one.

Social Bookmarking is an essential part of digital marketing.  You should submit your site to different social bookmarking services to help your search engine optimization.  Some sites give you "link juice" which helps boost your sites page rankings.  Some of these sites include Google Bookmarks, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, and Y! Bookmarks.  Pinterest is a little different though and is mostly beneficial if your site has a lot of visual content.  Bookmarking your site on these social sites can help your SEO because these sites already have a high ranking in the search results.  This is a great way to create inbound links to your website and help increase your Google PageRank.  The more people who see your site listed on these services, the more likely they are to visit your site.  It can also increase your earnings since these people were looking for something similar to your brand when they were on StumbleUpon, Pinterest, or any other social site.

Saving Time with Distribution Services

Never ending social media

There are many different content-distribution services that you can use to save you a lot of time.  These services have the ability to copy your social media content from one to another.  This way you do not have to go to every social media site that you are on and posting on each of them individually, instead you do it with a distribution service and it posts it onto all of the sites.  This is very helpful in digital marketing since people do not have all day to post on different sites.  Another advantage that can be used is scheduling posts.  With this you can make a post and have it scheduled to appear on Facebook for example whenever you want, maybe tomorrow or even the next week.  This can be very helpful if you do not have time to make a status every single day.


HootSuite is one of the leaders in social media management, with this service you can manage multiple social profiles, schedule your messages and tweet, track mentions of your brand, and analyze the social media traffic.  They are integrated with some of the most common social sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress, and Myspace.

TweetDeck which is owned by Twitter can be used to control your Twitter and Facebook campaigns.  It allows you to control your statuses, post comments, upload photos or videos, and follow friends all from the TweetDeck control panel

Postling is similar to HootSuite allowing you to be able to cross-post to all major social networking sites and blogging platforms.  You can post immediately or schedule your posts for later.  It also allows you to be able to respond to comments all in one place.  They also send you daily e-mails giving you a daily recap of the most recent activity on your profiles.

OnlyWire is a social media engine that you can use similar to other distribution sites, but is very helpful for people needing to advertise their brand with digital marketing.  You can promote your products and services to over 50 different sites simultaneously.  You can also schedule your posts just like the others so that way you can make your posts ahead of time saving you time from doing it later.  You can also track different statistics within OnlyWire to see how your posts are working.

All of these different tools are essential if you are interested in using digital marketing to grow your own business.  It would take you all day to make different posts on all kinds of sites, instead you can use one of these services to link all of your sites into one place and manage them all from within there.

Digital Marketing with Pinterest

Making Money with Pinterest

Pinterest has gained quite a lot of ground in the past couple of months and now marketers are now taking advantage of it.  It is more than just a way for you to share some photos with your friends, businesses can market their product without having to 'advertise'.  Wedding planners pin images of gowns, flowers, and table settings to gain the attraction of potential brides.  Catering companies pin images of their delicious recipes.  Travel agencies pin images of luxurious hotel suites, and island getaways hoping to catch your eye and bring you into their website.  Fashion brands pin images of different pieces of clothes.  All of these people use digital marketing on Pinterest to get their brand known and recognized and hopefully turn some of them into customers.

They upload some pictures of the content they want you to see, and then you are the one that re-pins the image and passes it on to your friends, which in turn is doing the work for the business.  All they have to do is upload the image.  They also set up the images so that way when you click on the images it can take you right to where that item is on their website.  It is also important that when a business is creating a new pin that they include different keywords to better help the search engine optimization.  People can also comment on pins which gives the business consumer information about if a person likes or dislikes one of their products.

Pinterest works very well with advertising because it is almost completely visual and products can be displayed in a pleasing manner which entices people to click on the pins.

Twitter and Digital Marketing

One way people are getting the word out about their brand is by using Twitter, some people are paying to have their accounts be promoted and pay for each follower they get or the have promoted tweets that people will see in their feed of tweets.  The other way you can get your brand out there is just like how any person like me or you would use twitter.  They create an account and tweet about their brand and if they tweet enough and the right stuff they will gain followers and people will learn about their brand without them having to pay anything for marketing.

There are some important things that you should know before you start tweeting about your brand though.

• Don't over promote-  make sure that everything you tweet isn't calling attention to your brand, don't always tweet buy this, do that, make sure you respond to people that have questions, and that some tweets are more general and not specifically related to the business.
• Ask Questions- get some interaction going! Ask your followers about whatever you want, maybe what is you favorite product of ours?
• Make sure to use personality- you want your followers to know that you are actually a human and not a bot, and make sure to use some humor in your tweets.  People love to find funny tweets and either favorite them or retweet them so all of their followers can see your tweet as well.
• Share links- tweet some links to some of your products, this way people can easily get to them and learn more, but make sure that not every tweet has a link in it! Then it is again like over promoting.
• Tweet every day- consistency can help bring success.  You do not have to tweet 50 times a day, just a couple of times a day to let your followers know you are involved.
• Make sure you know what you retweet-  before you retweet something make sure you know that it is proper for having your name attached to it and if it has a link in it make sure to check that link to ensure that it is the correct link and not some spam.

These are just a few important key features that you should follow when you are trying to promote your brand on Twitter, they can help to make sure your followers stay interested and don't hit that 'unfollow' button on your account!

Search Engine Digital Marketing Basics

There are two different main methods of search engine marketing:

Organic Placement (Search Engine Optimization)
This is what you are able to do to get your website ranked as high as possible on the search engines by doing things like back linking, relevant content, relevant keywords, well structured website, and updated frequently.
So all of this is things that can be done free and take time to do but will help more people find your website.

Some things that you should make sure you avoid is having duplicate content from other websites since the search engines do not like that, make sure that the content does not look "spammy" or fake and not like a real website.  Also make sure that you do not overuse your keywords that you are targeting, for example you should not use your keyword more than once in the title of an article.

Pay-Per-Click (Search Engine Marketing)
This is where ads are created to bring people into your website, you can create different text ads that can appear on the top of Google for example and when someone searches a keyword that you have your ad has a possibility of appearing and hopefully someone clicks your ad.  You can also make picture ads or video ads that you can place on either specific websites you choose or by selecting a category of websites that are similar to your product or service.

Search Engine Usage

You might wonder why a majority of digital marketing is done on Google instead of a site like Bing or Yahoo.  It is pretty easy to see why people choose Google over other search engines almost every time they make an ad, which is shown in this pie chart.

Google is the most utilized search engine with 81% of people using it.

Why would an advertiser want to advertise on a search engine that receives very little use and their ads will only be seen by a very small percentage of people?  They won't. they are most likely going to use Google because it is very well known and almost everyone uses Google, so why wouldn't you want your ad to appear to over 80% of the people on the internet?

This information was gathered from StatOwl
http://www.statowl.com/search_engine_market_share.php