Social media marketing is more than a passing trend. Just as your website has become a requirement for doing business, consumers are coming to expect that your business maintains digital outposts on the social media sites they inhabit.

The concept of social media is new territory for many people. The term describes websites and online platforms that facilitate the collaborative exchange of information among users. The online communities which inhabit these sites use Web 2.0 technologies (blogs, messaging tools, file sharing applications, etc.) to develop user-generated shared content.

Contrary to consumer expectations, many businesspeople think quite narrowly about social media, with their definition of it limited to social networking sites popular with younger audiences. But social media is more than just MySpace. Be it Facebook or LinkedIn, YouTube or Yahoo Answers, these Web 2.0-enabled sites appeal to a broad range of audiences. Niche sites have also developed that cater to specific consumer interests and, as such, have become influential digital outposts.

Social media marketing offers unique opportunities to B2C, B2B and non-profit organizations to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the creation of social media digital outposts and participation in social media networks. Rather than replacing traditional marketing channels, social media marketing can enhance your overall marketing strategy by fortifying relationships with customers and expanding brand awareness across different platforms.

Digital Brand Expressions advises our clients to carefully assess the social media environment, monitor the outposts where their audiences congregate, and create outpost-appropriate interactions with their communities. While social media marketing is about marketing, it tends to take a less direct approach than conventional advertising strategies, and, in fact, has more in common with media relations than direct response marketing.

Understanding the Web 2.0 environment will take time—but just as websites have become business essentials for company-to-audience messaging, so too, we predict, will social media outposts become essential for fostering customer-brand relations.