Online marketing has been evolving continuously with the passage of time. For a while, keyword campaigns and banner ads used to be the choice for advertising in cyberspace. However, the development of online social networks and the accompanying technological changes led to a new form of marketing known as Social Media Marketing (SMM). The techniques of SMM help the companies, particularly the newly established and small ones, reach the mass market rapidly and inexpensively. This article provides an overview of SMM including its characteristics, advantages, disadvantages and the possible future.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is primarily internet-based but has similarities with non-internet-based, marketing methods like word-of-mouth marketing. SMM is the way of promoting a website, brand or business by interacting with or attracting the interest of current or prospective customers through the channels of social media. It is also defined as the activities that permit marketers to receive large amount of traffic to their website by establishing attention and links.

The core idea behind SMM is that by listening to consumers, companies can understand what their expectations, values, needs and preferences are. SMM gives a holistic view about the consumers to the companies. The most important goal of SMM is to reach the masses. Therefore in order to attract a large number of users one makes use of popular social networking sites. There are two important requirements for effective SMM. The first of these is Social Media Optimization (SMO), whereby, a webpage can be improved by a webmaster, by adding links to services such as Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us so that the website's pages can be easily saved and submitted to these services. The other aspect is developing the means by which ardent fans and loyal customers of a brand or company can promote it themselves through various online social media sites.

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