Many small businesses have embraced social media as a way to market goods or services. As more of these online and offline businesses embrace social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, how do these businesses promote effectively online?

The creative engine behind social media is perhaps the most important ingredient that makes a campaign successful. Interesting and timely ‘posts’ on social media sites are necessary to capture your audience’s attention.

Internet Marketing Strategies

Offering Internet only specials may be a good way to generate foot traffic at a retail store, restaurant or bar. Posting ‘Events’ on Facebook may be an excellent way to promote an arts organization. Informing and educating clients about a service or organization is another way to gain new clients or members.

Whatever the content strategy may be, it surely involves a stream of new ideas. Social media can be very effective at driving more traffic to a business website. Yet no company or organization can continue to drop links on social networking sites to a business home page address and continue to be successful. Friends and contacts will get bored with this.

The website administrator or owner must continually create and publish new web pages, blogs, articles or press releases in order to post new ‘links’ to the website on social networking pages. Every time a new page or blog is added to a website, a new url is created.

Content Fuels Social Media

The creation of new, original content on a website is an excellent opportunity to post to social networking sites. Advertising a special or promotion is another great reason. There are many ways to angle posts on social networking accounts that are effective for sales. A social networking campaign can be a useful way to amplify content -- by working hand in hand with new content posted to a website.

Content is still king, especially with Google’s latest "Farmer’s Update." This new algorithm change penalizes websites that are content or link farms. It also downgrades websites where owners/administrators reuse published content instead of creating their own original material.

New, original content is more desirable for higher search engine ranking. Jill Whalen, of HighRankings.com has been saying this for well over a decade. Yet programmers, designers, business owners, and SEO specialists are always looking for ways to trick or outsmart search engine robots. Though it may take Google programmers some time to catch on to these methods, the end result is usually the same: the website is identified with these ‘tricks’ and downgraded.

Social networking is a wonderful way to create new business and start conversations with prospects and clients. By dropping fresh new links to a website on social networking accounts, a website owner is also helping in search engine ranking and recognition. Search engines crawl these links for related keywords and compile a list of links that point back to a website. Link baiting on social media accounts is a white hat technique.

The key to a successful social media campaign is the quality of the original content. In most cases content must be linked back to a company or organizational website. Once the visitor reaches a website, an appropriate call to action may be all it takes to convince a prospect to buy.

Without original content, any social media campaign is in danger of stagnating.

Learn more about organic SEO, white hat link building techniques, and social media campaigns by visiting http://www.maximumwebmarketing.com.