
Social media is not just a tool for seeing what your freinds are up to, it is also an incredibly powerful marketing tool that can be used by anyone anywhere. Facebook and Instagram can be used to reach millions of people in a way that appeals to them, with relevant ads that are more effective.

What Is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing means the use of various social media platforms and blogs to promote a business. While the terms’ digital marketing and e-marketing are dominant in academic circles, social media marketing has become increasingly popular for researchers and practitioners alike. In the past, it was believed that social media marketing would not be of interest to marketers, as it did not necessarily provide them with direct advertising. Today, however, this notion has been put to rest and social media has found itself as a major medium used by companies to communicate and market their products and services. The benefits are huge and it has proven to be very effective in increasing company visibility and sales. This is because when you get your message across via social media, people tend to read it without even trying to verify its accuracy.

Oportunities for Business
For any business, marketing has been a tedious process. It involves creating attractive advertisements to reach out to the general public. However, in today’s world, technology has made it much easier to reach out to people by using the various social platforms available online. This has made the process of creating advertisements, more efficient and cost effective. This is one of the reasons why companies prefer to advertise on these sites instead of traditional methods of advertisement. The advantages of social marketing are innumerable; one of which is the ability to reach out to people who live far away from the target audience. It is also known to have a large number of followers and users, thus it can easily spread word of your business.

Popular Platforms
There are several different social platforms that one can use for the promotion of your business. Facebook and Twitter are two of the popular sites. LinkedIn is a very popular site and it is one of the most popular networking sites for professionals as well. Google+, YouTube, MySpace and Digg are some of the other social sites that are commonly used by companies. It is important to choose the right social platform, because you need to ensure that the users of these sites know about the existence of your business. You need to use appropriate keywords so that they can find your advertisement and know about your products.