Social Media Marketing For Dummies®

Introduction

On August 23, 1999, Blogger launched as one of the earliest dedicated blog-publishing tools. At that time, social media was considered a niche activity on the fringes of the Internet. But today, Blogger is the 16th most popular site on the Internet, hosting millions of blogs. In a span of three years, Facebook has grown to over 200 million users, and Wikipedia, for all practical purposes, has replaced Britannica as an encyclopedia. Social media is today the most important phenomena transforming the Internet.

There is more to it than the phenomena, though. It also presents unique marketing opportunities, which force marketers to revisit the core guiding principles of marketing while providing new ways to reach social influencers and allow for people to influence each other and do the marketing for the brand. Social influence marketing (SIM) forces companies to rethink how they market online, to whom they market, and how to structure their own organizations to support these new marketing opportunities. For anyone involved with social influence marketing — and Internet marketing, more broadly — this is indeed an exciting time.

Social Media Marketing For Dummies is written to help you make sense of the madness. Because it's such a hot topic, the press and the experts alike are quick to frighten marketers, like you, and introduce new terminology that confuses rather than enlightens. This book cuts through all that noise and simply explains what social influence marketing is ...