Salwa is a digital artist, designer, blogger, and writer from U.K. She authors a blog at www.blogriffic.com. She is also on twitter

With the recent increase in social media programs, internet marketers are beginning to target social media sites for their marketing campaigns. But how exactly do you market your products through social media?

Most advertisements in social media are presented casually. Many ads don’t even have hyperlinks, and the viewers actually have to type in your URL into their internet browser. While you probably won’t get as much traffic as you would with a normal hyperlink advertisement, those who view your site will be HIGHLY targeted, as they have taken the time to visit your site.

Most social media marketing is done through YouTube. Short ads are often added to the beginning or end of videos, or even mixed in to the middle. Be warned that advertisements in videos can be very annoying to viewers, so don’t over do it. One small, tasteful ad in each video will suffice. Do not overwhelm your viewers with tons of long ads.

Many types of social media marketing do not appear to be done by the actual promoter, but rather the general public. Often a “fake grass roots” movement is started intentionally by a marketer. A blog or other webpage will be created, with a “normal guy” talking about a specific product. Statistically, people are more likely to purchase something recommended by a “normal dude” that they can relate to, rather than an advertiser. Viral videos are often used as well in order to promote a specific product or website.

The entire goal of marketing in social media is to be the next big thing. The internet is constantly changing, and new trends seem to spring up every day. If your marketing campaign is part of the latest trend, you can receive millions of visitors. Do not underestimate the power of suggestion. If whatever you produced is considered by the public interesting or funny enough to recommend to a friend, you can expect to see your traffic and sales rising rapidly.

As I said, YouTube videos are the most common medium for social media marketing. But why exactly is this? Because popular videos on YouTube receive massive amounts of views within hours. The top videos of the day usually have from 100,000-500,000 videos within the first 24 hours. As with any form of advertising, not everyone who views your ad will actually click on it. In my personal experience, a normal click through for YouTube videos is about 20-30%. This means that out of those 100,000+ views, you will receive 20,000-30,000 unique visitors to your site, all within 24 hours. Of course the click through rate will change drastically depending on ad placement, video subject, quality, etc, but if a popular video has your product in it, you can expect massive amounts of traffic.

Opinions vary as to whether or not social media is a good medium for internet marketing. Some think that traditional advertising works better, while some prefer social media. However, with social media on the rise, I expect that more people will be marketing through social media sites.

It was only  a matter of time before someone figured out how to import video into the Twitter web based application.  Kevin Sherman the developer of the BubbleTweet application has created a powerful tool for marketing professionals, that allows them to share a brief video description to pass along to passerby traffic that reaches their respected Twitter profiles.

The concept is simple we are a familiar with the literary cliché “A picture is worth a thousand words“, Sherman’s creation is destined to redefine that saying by allowing those thousands of words to be spoken, one Twitter profile at a time. To get started a person simply visits BubbleTweet and creates a short video welcoming other Twitter visitors to their particular profile page and offers them a brief opportunity to offer an explanation as to who they are and what they are hoping to accomplish during their stay on Twitter.

This is all done through a simple three step process:

Step 1: Visit the BubbleTweet website and type your Twitter ID in the field provided on the page.

Step 2: Create a simple video from a flash application that will be displayed on the screen. You’ll be prompt to allow BubbleTweet to access your web cam and your microphone.

Step 3: Once the video has be produced to one’s liking they will save it and BubbleTweet will send HTML code to be placed in the Bio section of the Twitter profile and viola instant video magic on the most popular micro-blogging website.

Man what a day!!! Over the past 12 hours i’ve read a dozen posts on “Twitter vs Friendfeed” and “Everyone is leaving Twitter” blah blah blah.

FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.

It’s interesting cause a lot of people have been chatting about Friendfeed over the last week. Michael Arrington from Techcrunch wrote about it, iJustine who is the Internet wrote about it, TechTicker wrote about it, & several other posts & “influencers” in the Social Media world have talked about it. Jeremiah Owyang who is a Sr. Analyst at Forrester Research also wrote about that actually inspired me to write this post & do the Video below (more about his post below).

Techcrunch talks about how much more interesting the conversations are on FriendFeed vs Twitter (which to me are a HUGE part of Social Media), iJustine is talking about “who will go mainstream first – Twitter or Friendfeed” and “asks does it really matter”, and a few others are chiming in.

Check out my thoughts on this 8 Minute video on FriendFeed:

Its very interesting because with Social Media, things change so fast so you can’t focus on the “Social Technologies” but focus on the “Social Touch” side of things, the people, the conversations, the relationships, then figure out which technologies would best fit you.

There’s so many technologies out there and guess what, you don’t have to be on all of them to succeed in Social Media Marketing. I promise.

Listen, I LOVE Twitter, it’s really helped my business & I’ve made some tremendous advancements in my business just become of the little tool. This is NOT about who’s better. Twitter sure has been having some issues over the last few weeks & some of the functionality has been taken away for periods of time, etc. That’s inconvenient for the folks that spend 8 hours a day on Twitter. LOL

Not only is FriendFeed a GREAT solution for when Twitter is down, I think the concept and what FriendFeed is up to is pretty outstanding. They just “get it.”

So back to Jeremiah’s post about the “Herding Behavior on FriendFeed.” A couple more folks who are at Forrester (Charlene Lie & Josh Bernoff) wrote a book called “Groundswell – Winning in a transformed by social technologies” that talks about what Jeremiah referred today in his post. He talked about the Social “Technographics” which is a tool to allow people in business to examine and then create strategies based on the groundswell tendencies of any group of people.

The Social Technographics ladder represents a group of consumers more involved in the groundswell than the previous steps. Take a look at the image below:

Jeremiah says that…“aaside from aggregating content (you can see all my tweets, flickr, digg, upcoming, blogs on one stream) you yourself can be a creator, critic, collector, joiner, or spectator.”

It’s too soon to see who will go mainstream first, and if FriendFeed will do what Facebook did to Myspace, or predict any of those type of things, the one thing that is for sure is that FriendFeed’s concept is RIGHT ON. I think this is where social media is going as having all these tools, sites, etc in one place makes it easier to:

• be more productive (not having to login to 20 different sites)
• monitor you or your brand
• research & staying ahead of the pulse

Who’s to say that Twitter or FriendFeed won’t go under tomorrow, that’s irrelevant, the point is that FriendFeed is onto something with their concept and if the influencers are attracted to it, there’s definitely something to say about it.

Over the next week or so I’m going to be playing with it & will write about my thoughts about it.

What are YOUR thoughts about FriendFeed so far?

Please make sure to also leave your FriendFeed URL.

I’ll start http://FriendFeed.com/successfool

You’ll also wanna make sure to add my good buddy Maria Reyes-McDavis the WebSuccessDiva here: http://friendfeed.com/websuccessdiva

Stay Hungry – Stay Foolish

Alejandro Reyes

Image source, Forrester and FriendFeed, screenshot taken by me