Social media marketing is a form of internet marketing which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks. Social Media is a shorter top level term that describes the space overall, and covers the activities around social interaction, content, videos, images and audio exposure.

Social media marketing can help you increase the activity around these top goals:

• Website traffic and user behavior (external and internal tracking)
• Conversion and sales tracking
• Page views, ad exposure
• Growing brand awareness
• Creating a positive brand association and keeping it there Business development and a broader customer reach

I suggest you begin by outlining clear goals for your social media marketing efforts and determine how you’ll measure success. Once you’ve outlined your goals, let’s look at some great ways you can begin to leverage social media for your marketing efforts.  I'll provide a couple examples and you can take it from there.

Multimedia (video, photos, audio) is a bit more complicated for many small businesses to execute, but can provide excellent social media marketing opportunities.

Fundamental Tactic: YouTube has been constantly evolving and adding features that make it an attractive social site. Although you don’t have to produce videos to participate on YouTube, you should consider whether easy videos can assist your marketing efforts. For instance, if you’re already posting videos to your blog, you can upload them to YouTube to reach a broader audience, and embed the video content in your blog posts. YouTube has also been adding more comprehensive activity updates for its users and has made pretty powerful analytics tools available so that you can evaluate the efficiency of your video content.

Likewise, you could create a Flickr account for your business and post photos of your customers or your products. Flickr offers a place where people can share photos with others, but also has discussion groups, many focused on local markets, which offer additional opportunities for you to market your business.

Progressive Strategy: Advanced strategies using multimedia are complicated and typically benefit from using experienced consultants. One effective way to leverage video, for example, is to create content that has the potential to become viral. While I don’t believe you can set out to make a viral video (an incredible amount of luck is typically involved), there are a number of things you can typically do to build awareness about your small business using viral video. Once you’ve created good content, you’ll want to distribute it using as many social networks as you can.

Here is a great video for a quick overview