Social networking is a form of advertising that has been growing almost exponentially over the past decade. It is a great way to generate good rapport with your customers and positive publicity around the Internet. Social networking is targeted and helps bring in repeat customers.

At the time of writing this, the most popular social networks are Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Having an account on one or all of these social media websites is essential for an effective social marketing campaign. Social media sharing websites include YouTube, Y! Video, Metacafe, AOL Video, Blogger, and WordPress. They are all different forms of social media that are useful for social networking and viral marketing.

Once you create an account for a social network, the next step is to target a potential audience. What kind of lifestyle do your customers live? What are their hobbies, occupations, and interests? Are there regional limitations to your product market span?

After picking your target audience, it is time to create the message you want to get across. What would you like to do for your guests? Motivate them? Inform them? Guide them? Connect them? Create the content on your social marketing website to reflect your chosen purpose. Are you planning to market mainly business to consumer (B2C) or business to business (B2B)? Either way, the end goal is customer loyalty and repeat visits to your e-commerce website, but the way of going about this may vary depending on which group you plan to make your target audience.

Since online marketing is not traditional marketing, it is important to remember that followers generated through online marketing campaigns are largely going to be those with whom you are able to generate the best rapport. It is important to be authentic and genuine in what you write as well as the way you write it. Use a friendly and conversational tone on social networking websites. At the same time, you want to be an expert on your subject! People will come to you for information and advice, and providing them with it will help you generate rapport with your visitors. Be a marketer, but do not act like a salesperson. The idea is to get people to come to trust your company name because they trust and like you and your online presence on social networking websites.

Lastly, social network advertising is measurable if you take the time to track it. Track the time spent developing social network profile content, messages, and social network promotions. Keep a log of the size of your network on various social media websites, whether they are “friends” or “followers” or “fans” of your particular social network profile. Your return on investment, or ROI, is the money invested in marketing divided by the number of followers on your profile. For example, $1100 spent on marketing divided by 440 followers is an ROI of $2.50 per person influenced.

Take the time to learn about social media and attract followers online through social network websites like Facebook and Twitter. These social media websites are not just for finding your long-lost high school friends; social network websites are a great potential source of traffic to your website.

I run a small offline business which in recent months has enjoyed a very nice upswing in business thanks to the internet. This was no accident – I’ve been working hard on my marketing for about a year. Much of this effort was spent learning how to market my business online.

During this process of getting it right, I’ve bought some garbage courses and information. But, within the piles of garbage I’ve also bought some real gems that without I’d not be enjoying my recent surge in sales and new customers.

As I look back about what’s were good purchases for learning marketing and which were not useful at all, I’ve come up with the following criteria to look for when choosing a business marketing guide or system.

3 Criteria When Choosing a Small Business Marketing System:

1. Don’t buy a small business marketing system that promises to teach you everything about marketing. What you’ll often get is a lot of fluff and little substance. You’ll probably know most of the information already in the massive “all-in-one” marketing kits.

No marketing author can tell you about print advertising, SEO, social media, referrals, viral marketing, e-mail marketing, direct marketing, TV ads, etc. Each of these topics on their own are self-contained guides or systems.

Instead, know exactly what you wish to learn about or improve, and buy a business marketing guide that caters to your need specifically.

2. Don’t buy from someone who doesn’t have real-life marketing experience. You preferably want to buy from someone who actually runs a small business and does their own marketing.

There are hundreds of people who write about marketing and sell “marketing systems” but have never done it for real.

3. Be prepared to do the work yourself – or at least do some of it so you get a hands-on education so you can properly hire people to implement the marketing activities taught. If you’re not prepared to roll up your sleeves and take action, no business marketing system will work for you.

In my view the best type of business marketing guide to buy is one that teaches you how to hone your online marketing. Focusing my marketing activities on the Internet has by far worked the best for me during the last 6 to 12 months.