I bet many times when you hear people talking about social media marketing you think it is only a great way to brand a company.
I don’t blame you. Since most gurus don’t really have a clue on how to use social media for business, they talk about branding a lot.
There are several other reasons why social media is not an option in marketing anymore and is a must.
Have you heard of Alexa.com? If you are one of my clients, you sure did.
Alexa is a tool that tells you the popularity of websites and allows you to compare page views.
You can go to www.Alexa.com and download the tool bar for your computer.
Anyway, I’d like you at least to visit their site and try to compare Google.com with YouTube.com and check the pageviews.
You will see that YouTube has more page views than Google.
Can you believe this?
If you do the same with Google and Facebook, you will see that many days, Facebook has more page views than Google.
If you combine Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, you will see that they will have a higher reach than Google.
When you consider what Google is as a company and as a search engine, this data is really amazing.
Now, if you go to Google and star typing some words that you know have a lot of competition, do you know what happens?
Try “beautiful girls”. That is a search term with 70,300,000 results on Google.
There are 10 results per page. 7 of them, including the first four are from social media sites.
Try now “get six pack abs”- comes with 1,200,000 results.
6 of them are social media, including the first 3 results.
When you are doing anything online for business, you need to be found. You know people will not go beyond the first or second page on a search engine looking for something.
What do you do when you are in a competitive market?
What do you do when you don’t want to spend a lot of money to be on the first page?
What do you do to stay in the first page?
Yes, my friend, you stop being a pansy and start getting serious about using social media.
Wait too much, and this opportunity willbe gone. It is going to get crowded out there.
Read this post again, it is worth, it may change your business, and it is only one reason why you cannopt wait to use social media marketing.
I rest my case. Well, at least until next week.

The new episode of Who pops your popcorn? covers the main reasons why people fail when using social media. We also talk about a very cool new feature on YouTube that can increase your results and Andrew Lock host of Help my business gives you a very cool tip.
Watch our marketing web tv show now!

My mother is 72 and technology is not her cup of tea. Since I moved with her only granddaughter to another country 5 years ago, she reluctantly has learned how to send e-mails, not without complaining quite often how ugly the computer, or “thing” as she calls it, was in her living room. Today, things are quite different. When I asked her a few months ago what she wanted for her birthday, thinking she was going to ask for a new croc pot, she requested a new digital camera to use with the “thing”.
Every time we speak using Skype, she uses the camera. She then, sends the pictures to her wall on Facebook, so her new friends can see the granddaughter.
My mother is very good with knitting looms, she makes wonderful scarves. She takes pictures of them and list them on Flickr, and she has even learned to name the pictures with the right keywords. She uses her blog and etsy.com to sell her pieces. Since she got the camera, she started putting together some video tips on crafts and she posts them on Gather. She says the “thing” helped her find a new life and brought a less painful meaning to the word “distance”.