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Social Media Marketing is the next big thing. In fact it’s already here, and the rush has begun. So before we jump aboard, let’s just have a quick check-up to see exactly what it is that everyone’s getting so excited about.

Brief history lesson. When the internet first took off around 1995-1996 it only had basic web pages, which were essentially online newspapers, magazines and sales letters. There was no inter-activity. The web site owners put their sites up, and the surfers viewed it. If the surfers liked it they kept coming back, if it was an information based site, or they bought the product if it was a sales page.

If you were a business owner and you wanted to attract new customers to your site the only option was to try for a high-up placing in the search engines. So fortunes were spent on consultant’s fees to get them a good position in various search engines (Google had not shown up at this early stage).

And because all the search engines were different and used different criteria (or algorithms, as we would say now), this was a near-impossible task. The main option outside search engines was banner advertising and building a list of prospects – but you still had to attract visitors to your web site in the first place.

Then came a few significant developments, which were

• forums, which enabled the surfers to give their opinions of just about anything, including what they liked and disliked on the web. They also enabled web site owners to leave comments or take part in discussions and create back links to their own sites.
• Google, which quickly became the market leader in search engines, and introduced the concept of “pay per click” advertising on the internet.
• Blogs, which took the inter-activity of the web to a new level, and put the creation of back links to your own web site onto a whole new level.

And now we have the next stage of all this, which is Social Media. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Delicious, YouTube and Digg have revolutionised the internet. Now most people use the internet to communicate with their friends and colleagues (other than by email) and give voice to their opinions and concerns.

This has opened up the market for the small to medium sized business owner. If you know how to use these social media sites, or dozens of others like them, then you can massively increase your presence on the internet, discard offline marketing, and save yourself thousands in advertising costs.

The secret is just knowing how to use those sites. Or in finding someone who does.

Philip Gegan