Social media marketing is growing. Wherever you look, marketers are taking it as an integral part of internet promotion. Moreover, if you are blogging or building a website on a general interest topic (for example, music, videos and similar stuff) where quantity of traffic is more important than quality of traffic – social media marketing is the must have “add on” to your marketing mix.

However, what does social media marketing mean?

Everybody is a social media marketing expert and in most of the cases, their marketing skills end up after adding as many buttons as they can at the end of each post. To add to this, if you ask some of them, they would say that they are writing interesting posts to engage the visitors (do you really think that writing a numbered post (top 10 list of….) would get you more visitors from a social network?).

There is a basic difference between visitors from social media and organic visitors from search engines.

Visitors from search engine have a problem and they are searching a solution using some keywords. Now, the search algorithm recommends your post to the visitor. Thus, you got a niche visitor who got some idea about what he or she is looking for.

However, in case of a visitor from social media, he or she does not know exactly what to expect from that link (post). All they have is a holy clue from the title and mini description that another visitor has scribbled in a hurry. Oops, there is another thing that can help the new visitor – the tags someone is using to categorize your post.

To add to this, the popularity of your post in that network depends a lot on the existing visitor’s interaction with your post. If he or she casts a vote in your favor, you may get one more visitor. The same does not happen with visitors from search engines (though there are some buzz in the market that Google is going to use Digg like voting system in their SERP.)

In this situation do you really think;

1. Adding buttons is enough for social media marketing.
2. Writing “list post” is enough for social media marketing.

I would also like to know how you engage yourself with a social media community.