So we all know that social media is the new way everyone is marketing themselves today. There are so many aspects to it that it is easy to forget one of most basic ways to promote yourself - which is through your friends and family. Your friends and family will support your endeavors and help promote you, which can give you the stepping stone you need to get noticed by others. Even if you already have a well established business, asking for the support from family and friends will help you.

Traditionally, public relations is about crafting strategic messages that communicate exactly what the organization wants people to hear.  Today, more and more businesses are creating their own content in the form of blogs, articles, “Tweets,” and white papers.

This user-generated content, like traditional PR, improves communications, generates publicity, builds awareness, and increases rankings in search engines. 

Social networking has forever changed the way businesses and consumers interact. Today’s consumer doesn’t want to be sold on a product. With immediate access to the opinions and recommendations of trusted sources such as friends and family, your target audience is far less likely to rely on you as their first and only source of authoritative information.

Marketing is all about pushing the company messages out to target audiences through a variety of channels, which can include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. However, social media is about engaging in conversations with your target audience, something that push marketers aren’t that skilled at. Try promoting your business on Twitter and Facebook, and you will lose followers. Social media is not specifically for lead generation (marketing) but more for raising brand awareness and thought leadership (PR).

It’s important to know when the highest percentage of your audience is eavesdropping on your social networks—so that when you share content you’ll get maximum exposure and achieve optimum results. This data is courtesy of KISSmetrics, an analytics provider for web-based businesses. I’ve provided data on e-mail marketing and blogging, too.

Remember when you were a child and you sat in a circle and one person whispered something into the ear of the child next to them and this continued around the circle until the message came back to the original speaker? Was the message ever the same? Rarely!

This is what happens sometimes when we issue a press release. Journalists may trim your press release to a few sentences. With twitter, well-intentioned followers will reinterpret your release into less than 140 characters, potentially causing the message to be garbled and lose its full meaning.

Social media is fast becoming a leading outlet for savvy marketers to capitalize on their brand. By some estimates, social networking now accounts for 11 percent of all time spent online in the US. Between December 2008 and December 2009, total visits to the top 10 social networking sites increased 63 percent. Nearly one in 10 Internet visits ends up at a social network; nearly one in four page views is on a social networking site.

So, what exactly is engagement? No, we aren’t talking about when your significant other gets down on one knee and asks for your hand in marriage. We are talking about web engagement – the interaction of people with online channels.

Engagement comes in many forms today, through commenting to a blog post, to retweeting an interesting tweet, to connecting through a social network, to interacting to an online forum, and more.

There are a number of different ways people interact online. These people can be classified as:

With all this socializing going on, the challenge of coordinating and integrating messages across multiple social networks platforms has become top-of-mind. Businesses, large and small, are using social media platforms – but for very different reasons.

20 Twitter Marketing Tips for Social Media Success Everyone tweets these days, but some people just don't get it. Social Media can be a great marketing tool for spreading the word about your company, yourself, your industry, your customers, etc. Here are some tips to make you successful!