<p><img src="http://social-media-advertising.com/images/sandrabullock.jpg" alt="Social Media Marketing" />In order to understand <strong>Social Media Marketing</strong> we need a definition for “<strong>Social Media</strong>” and “<strong>Social Networking</strong>”. To it put simply, Social Media is user generated content on the Internet. You may have come across the term <strong>web2.0</strong> during the recent months. Social Media and Social Networking are web2.0. In the early days (well, actually only a few years ago) websites were quite static and passive. There was not much interaction going on as they were mostly corporate brochures converted to online use. The only way to participate was to send an emails or forms to the owners or webmaster of the website and hope they\’d get back to you. That was called web1.0.<br /><br />Today <strong>Social Media</strong> refers to a particular collection of websites whose content is primarily written and published by their users and not owners or employees of the site. For example most videos you see on <strong>YouTube</strong> are uploaded or published by regular people like you and me; not by YouTube employees or staff. Nearly all articles published on Wikipedia are written or edited by people who are not connected to Wikipedia in any way. Instead of normal corporate websites which are created by the companies, the contents on Social Media websites are created by their users and readers; you and me.<br /><br /><strong>Social Media</strong> is people exchanging personal comments and views using various online platforms such as blogs and micro blogs, chat rooms, social networks and bookmarks, bulletin boards, mountain photo and video sharing sites and virtual worlds.<br /><br /><strong>Here are just a few of these Social Media platforms:</strong></p> <ul> <li> Facebook</li> <li>YouTube</li> <li>Bebo</li> <li>Flickr</li> <li>Twitter</li> <li>Second Life</li> <li>LinkedIn</li> <li>Tumblr</li> <li>Digg</li> <li>Technorati</li> <li>Stumble Upon</li> <li>MySpace</li> <li>Delicious</li> <li>QZone</li> <li>Wipedia and other wikis</li> </ul> <p>According to <strong>Wikipedia </strong>“<strong>Social Media Marketing</strong>” also known as “<strong>Social Influence Marketing</strong>” is the act of using social influencers, social media platforms and online communities for marketing, publication relations and customer service. To put it in more simple terms, <strong>Social Media Marketing (SMM)</strong> or <strong>Social Media Advertising (SMA)</strong> is a special area of marketing that uses Internet\’s social platforms in order to deliver commercial messages to potential consumers.<br /><br /><strong>Social Media Marketing</strong> is a collection of methods and operations for generating commercial publicity through social media websites and online communities. <strong>Social Media Advertising</strong> is planning and executing advertising campaigns on those platforms. Social Media Marketing and Social Media Advertising have become the hottest topics in current global commercial environment. The reasoning behind this action is simple: <em><strong>The advertisers have to go where their clients hang out. And today their client’s hang out on web2.0 Social Media websites.</strong></em></p> <p><a rel="nofollow" onClick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(\’/outgoing/article_exit_link\’);" href="http://facebook-advertising-guide.com/" target="_blank" title="Facebook advertising Guide"><img src="http://social-media-advertising.com/images/facebookadvertisingguide.jpg" alt="Facebook Advertising Guide" /></a></p> <p>That was the e