by Jo Linsdell

Created on: February 13, 2010   Last Updated: February 14, 2010

According to www.pingdom.com there were 1.73 billion Internet users worldwide in 2009. The number of blogs on the Internet was 126 million. The number of tweets on Twitter was 27.3 million per day  and 350 million People were on Facebook  with 50% of Facebook users that log in every day. Now that's a lot of people who could be finding out about your company.

Social media marketing is a growing trend that even the big name companies and marketing pros are dipping into. The use of on-line communities to gain extra exposure, opportunities and sales with low or no cost is changing the marketing world.

Social media marketing has also been shown to assist in increasing traffic to websites, opt-in lists and subscribers, resulted in new business partnerships and helps rise in search engine rankings whilst reducing overall marketing expenses (information taken from the Social Media Industry Marketing Report published by www.socialmediaexaminer.com).

www.comStore.com states that Social networking now accounts for 11 percent of all time spent on-line in the US and showed an 18% Increase in Internet users worldwide between 2008 and 2009.

There are an ever growing number of social media options to choose from but the most popular are www.twitter.com, www.facebook.com and www.LinkedIn.com.

The use of these sites allows you to give up to date information about your company and products to a large audience whilst also allowing feedback from customers. You can also target certain markets by interest and topic meaning that you can contact your target audience and not waste time and money on people who would not be interested.

The first documented spam message was sent out to 393 recipients on ARPANET on May 3, 1978. Although back in 1978, the term “spam” didn’t exsist yet. With Social Media there is no longer need for companies to result to such actions in order to spread the word about themselves and the services/products they offer. Technology has come a long way and is continuing to create even more ways of simplifying marketing.

Social Media Sites can now also be checked and updated from portable devices and even mobile telephones meaning that even more people will be using them in the future.

Any company wanting to keep up with the times and get the best results possible should be using social media marketing for their company.

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