Does Social Media Marketing Work?

[seolyka2]

I would say Social Media Marketing really works. It can help you establish your brand and engage with your customers, potential visitors and other people who are interested in your business.

[aditd]

I am interested in using social media marketing as part of the strategies to promote my site. I also need some insights from those who have been doing it. My question is what you think about it? Does it really work?

It even works to make sales doing this kind of marketing. Promoting your site it's even simple ( cause people will click links ). So do it.

[hosting]

Google likes to encourage business people to use social media marketing.

If you use wordpress, sexybookmark plugin looks good.

[Yasir Liaqat]

It is easy to say that social media is the one of the best off page optimization techniques and everyone is agreed. Actually it is the source to give the opportunity to the site owners to help your customers, friends and the site visitors to keep in touch with your business and the upcoming promotions. So it is quite helpful for not only getting the traffic towards the site but to help in boosting the business as well.

[I_M]

Give it a go, it's not that hard to get FB friends and followers. That and creating a Twitter account don't take long. Whether they're of any use to you is another matter of course; for example it's easy to get 200 FB friends from a country such as India but your target may be European.

[Noble123]

Basically the success rate depends upon the niche of your site. News and music related sites get more attention than any other type of sites especially from social media. So for best results you should try your own to check how much it is effective in your case.

[morestar]

Yup if you can get some REAL followers or friend or likes then google will give a lot of weight to that for your webpage. But if you start buying a lot of likes and friends, although they are advertised as "real" many times google will probably be able to detect this so do this as your own risk. But social media can def be an effective platform to market off of.

I don't think Google can tell unnatural Likes on Facebook pages. There's a sort of Like ranking system for Facebook but that's theres and possibly BINGs too unless they share the information with Google.

I don't believe purchasing friends (who does this?) could affect anything either. Just saying...

[sunil.PPC]

The social media budgets of marketers is constantly increasing as the survey data to the right shows. Forsee Results’ research showed that the resources companies put into social media and the results they receive vary wildly. Spending more money does not automatically lead to higher numbers of visits to websites, brand awareness or sales.

[CoolDiamond]

It does. But social media marketing cannot be done quickly unless you are already a popular brand. Many people think that only need to create a page on Facebook or Twitter and get followers at once. That's not true. Social media marketing comprehends a lot of work requiring generating content which would be interesting for your followers and fans. When you acquire enough followers (through ads, invitations by e-mail or directly on your site) you should always keep their attention (interesting posts, sharable content, dialogues, competitions etc.) and never let them forget about you. If you do it right your followers will work for you by bringing new people to follow you as well.

[trade-show-oracle]

For most companies, I think their idea of social media marketing is setting up a FaceBook page. Does it work? For most, I'd guess not. But it doesn't cost much to try.
What I would really like to see is some actual case studies showing how social media worked for company XYZ, quantifying what it actually did (sales or profit), and why it worked. Until then, I would be skeptical, and wouldn't invest very much in it.