Search Engine Marketing for Small Business

It’s been a year and a half since going to a movie theater, but last night I broke that streak and went to see the “Social Network.” I was intrigued at the story behind Facebook, but more importantly, I wanted to see in a a two hour snapshot how Facebook spread so quickly world-wide.

I have come to the conclusion, for obvious reasons, that between the information and new technology available to us, anything that is appealing, entertaining or important will go ‘viral’ on it’s own, without having to physically do any work yourself.

Viral is a term that many people have heard in recent years, mainly because of YouTube and many of its recent humorous videos, but for those that don’t understand the term, it simply means: content such as a picture, video or text being spread by word-of-mouth via the internet (social networks).

Viral marketing is achievable for any business, just as it has been successful for non-business related content. The difficulty is coming up with the content that everyone will want to latch on to that will help you gain brand-awareness.

Facebook originally started with an idea, or according to the movie, a stolen idea. Once developed, the way it transformed into something of value was that it caught on quickly by word of mouth by way of the internet.

Now that Facebook exists, it gives us a platform for which we can share content with each other, thus making viral marketing much easier.

Social media platforms such as Facebook have made the content-sharing integration seamless for us regular Joes. With one click of the share button, we can send this article or any other video, blog post or picture to social media for all to see. Hopefully the goal is sincere in the sense that we have something of value to share with friends, rather than force-feeding spam to everyone – because it will get old very quick and privacy features have made it simple to hide or remove certain people from our constant stream of news.

If you take anything from what I am saying, it is this: social media platforms like Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin and many others have made content sharing very easy for us all. The tools are available to everyone; the key, though, is to create original and valuable content that others will want to read, see or hear.  Only then do you open up the slight possibility that they might share your content with their network, and their network may share it with their network, and so on. Then, hey, you may just be on to something!