by Doreen Martel

Created on: May 27, 2010

In previous days, if you opened a small business and created a website, your options for marketing were fairly limited. You could purchase advertising, spread the word on your business cards and marketing materials and depend on key word searches for new "tech savvy" customers to find you. Today, Social Media Marketing (SMM) has changed all of this and in fact has impacted the overall marketing plan for many business owners. There are some significant advantages of social media marketing including:

Cost - While many promotion specialists will tell you that social media marketing is free this is not entirely accurate. When you are running a business, time is money. While social media marketing is very cost effective it does come with a price tag associated with the time you invest in promotion. In addition, if you elect to automate your social media marketing, there is an additional cost involved.  With these expenses aside, the advantage of social media marketing is still the low cost associated with it versus more traditional marketing.

Impact - Marketing is designed to have as much of an impact on as many people as possible at one time. Consider how many people may be watching a television program when an advertisement is aired. Consider how many people may be reading a specific newspaper that contains an advertisement. Both of these pale in comparison to the number of potential people you can impact with one simple social media plug.

Take a look at the possible impact that your social media marketing could have an you'll immediately see the advantage. Here is an example:

- You have 500 followers on Twitter

- You send out one advertising "tweet"

- Two of those followers "re-tweet" your advertisement to their followers

- Each of those followers have 500 of their own followers

With one "tweet" even if you do not have one person besides your first level pass on your information, you have reached 1,500 people with one simple statement.  While it is certainly true that each person who passes on your information will not result in a customer, you are developing name recognition. This is one of the most hard to overlook impacts of social media marketing. It would require a very special marketing campaign to reach the number of people in only minutes that you can reach online in that same time period.

Brand establishment - One of the most critically important things that a business must do when they are getting started is to establish their own brand. 

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