Hi karthik here,

The term Social Media Marketing (SMM) refers to the implementation of marketing techniques with the help of social media sites such as Delicious, Face book and etc. By knowing its power, many people have started to build reputation for their website through social media sites. Social media sites are broadly classified into following categories such as,

1.  Social Networking sites

a)      Orkut

b)      Myspace

c)      LinkedIn

d)      Xanga

e)      Pownce

f)       VOX

g)      Friendster

h)      Hi5

i)       Bebo

j)       Piczo

2. Social Bookmarking sites

a)      Digg

b)      Technorati

c)      Delicious

d)      StumbleUpon

e)      Squidoo

f)       Reddit

g)      Furl

h)      Newsvine

i)        Blinklist

3. Video sharing sites

a)      YouTube

b)      Metacafe

c)      Revver

d)      Vimeo

e)      VSocial

f)       Google Video

4. Image sharing sites

a)      Flickr

b)      Smugmug

c)      Zoomr

5. Content Rating Sites and lots more

Use of Social Media Sites:

People make use of Social Media Sites for the following reasons,

1. To improve their online presence and thereby enhance their online marketing

2. To generate publicity for their website

3. To share content with others in the community

4. To get more inbound links

So far we have been talking about the importance and uses of “Social Media Sites”. Let’s now discuss the difference between the “Social Media Optimization” and “Search Engine Marketing”.

Though SMO (Social Media Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is found to be related to each other, still there’s a lot of difference between them and it is discussed here.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a technique used to promote a website using the following methods such as Paid inclusions, Paid Placement, Contextual Advertising, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and as a result, the visibility of a website is increased in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

Social Media Optimization (SMO) on the other hand, refers to a set of actions that put forth to build visibility to a website through Social Media Sites, RSS feeds, incorporating Social news buttons, third party video and image sharing functionalities within a site and thereby boosting its search engine ranking.

Compared to Search Engine Marketing, the Social Media Optimization process is very simple to carryout and it doesn’t incur more cost to the website owner.

Follow these simple steps to achieve success with social media sites:

1. Register an account with all Social Media  sites
2. Create your own profile and let others know “who you are”
3. Update your content regularly (bookmark or submit your content)
4. Share with other community members
5. Let traffic flows in and you get success.