These days it seems that everyone is talking about social media. Networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook have exploded in the past two years, but the billions of users they have aren't just restricted to young high school kids that want to share photos with each other. More and more business professionals and even entire brands are creating profiles and collecting followers through these emerging media outlets. The result of this phenomenon has been termed social marketing or more specifically social media marketing and the implications it has for how business will market and profit in the next decade are enormous.

Strictly defined, social marketing is the practice of using social influential media outlets, like networking sites and other online communities, for the purpose of marketing a product or conducting customer relations and public outreach. In recent years, the user bases of these types of sites have grown exponentially, creating these mass markets of demographically diverse people all able to be reached through the same forum, the networking site itself. Now that businesses have caught on to the fact that, when handled properly, they too can create personalities that exist to communicate with their audience solely via the social media channel, marketing through these media has grown as well.

A business can benefit from social marketing in a plethora of different ways, but one of the most important is the fact that it is a great place to share links to your website and thus pick up an enormous amount of regular traffic. Bloggers and informational website owners have been using networking sites to share their product for years, why shouldn't the same awareness raising techniques work for businesses with something to sell?

While social marketing activity can indeed help you make sales, remember to use a more delicate approach than you would in a normal marketing atmosphere. Users of social media are very sensitive to infiltration by salesmen that want to corrupt the very organic nature of the connections you can make there. Focus instead on building credibility and relationships with your current and potential customer base. When the time comes they will be a great asset for spreading the word about a new product or partnership. Another thing to remember is that it is almost always a good idea to develop separate personal and business accounts. Even if your personal account lists you as the CEO of the company, it is better to have distinct outlets for your brand and your personality to express themselves.