The Internet is alive with places to market your business, and more are coming on the scene each day. This can lead to hyperactive attempts to conduct comprehensive internet marketing 2.0 campaigns, but it is not always worth leaping onto each new bandwagon. Particularly if you have a limited budget. However, some sites are leading the way in their field and do provide valuable opportunities for Online Public Relations (PR) and marketing at very little expense. Social Bookmarks Del.icio.us led the way back in 2003, offering every Internet user the chance to bookmark sites and content of interest at del.icio.us and share those with other users. Delicious has grown from strength to strength and offers websites a valuable chance to gain backlinks and exposure. Others in a similar vein are Digg, Furl, Reddit, and Stumbleupon. You can easily access this audience by adding the appropriate code into the footer of your site, or after valuable content or articles, so that your visitor adds you to their list of social bookmarks. Photo Galleries Flickr was one of the first sites that offered users the chance to share their photos with the rest of the world. It is worth creating a photo album of your company's products and photos, and where permissible allowing these photos to be used on other people's websites, with an accreditation, particularly if the photo clearly shows your brand, logo, URL etc. Twitter Once upon a time there was blogging, and now there is twitter. This is a seemingly meaningless application that allows users to send messages from their mobile phone or through a Web application on to the Twitter website (or your own) to say, What I am doing now". Twitter could prove to be one of those social networking experiences which dies out over time, or it could become part of your marketing toolbox. For canny marketers however Twitter is being used as a tool which offers a very simple method to regularly inform customers about products, services etc, and to widen exposure of your company. Whether you twitter during the launch of a product, or twitter whilst at an exhibition, conference or awards ceremony, or use it as a mini-blog, or to announce a sale of your products, you can use this tool effectively to capture the interest of your customers and promote what you are doing with your business. A Senior Manager at Amazon uses it, and if he does....you can be sure that Amazon are finding value in it as a communication and marketing tool. Whichever of the new social tools you decide to incorporate into your marketing strategy, you should ensure that they build on your current policies and fit your budget, and particularly the time available to you. A blog or twitter site that is full of enthusiasm one day and then abandoned the next does nothing for the image of your company.
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