As of the Summer of 2012, there are hundreds of Social Media/Networking sites available on the Internet.

Many of these websites have niche audiences that are hyper-focused on an industry or an interest. These are great places for certain industries to concentrate their efforts. Much of the content on these site are User Generate Content. The audience is an active and important part of the experience. By sharing their thoughts, photos and experiences, the users themselves help shape a visitor's opinion of a business, destination or place of interest.

An example would be the food industry. Restaurants, foodies, travelers and caterers really engage in sites like Yelp, Urban Spoon and Trip Advisor. These sites attract a large audience of people who spend time, energy and money eating out so engaging with them can be very beneficial to the food service industry.

Popular Social Networking Sites as of January 2013

		◊ Facebook is a social networking website launched in February 2004 and operated now as a public company as of May 2012. Users can add people as friends and send them messages and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Facebook.com
		◊ LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. LinkedIn has over 80 million registered users, spanning more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. The site is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Linkedin.com.
		◊ Twitter is a social networking and microblogging services that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text- based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Since late 2009, users can follow lists of authors instead of following individual authors. All users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, external applications (notably including those developed for smartphones), or Short Message Services (SMS). The website currently has more than 150 million users worldwide. Twitter.com
		◊ YouTube is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos. In November 2006 YouTube, was bought by Google for $1.65 billion, and now operates as a subsidiary of Google. The company is based in San Bruno, California and uses Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos. Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, although media corporations including CBS, the BBC, VEVO and other organizations offer some of their material via the site, as part of the You Tube partnership program. You Tube is also the second largest search engine behind Google. YouTube.com
		◊ Flikr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web service suite and online community created by Ludicorp and later acquired by Yahoo. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media. Flikr.com
		◊ Yelp is a Web 2.0 company that operates a social networking, user review and local search website of the same name. Over 31 million people access Yelp's website each month putting it in the top 150 of U.S. Internet web sites. Yelp.com
		◊ Photobucket is an image hosting, video hosting, slideshow creation and photo sharing website. It was founded in 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal and received funding from Trinity Ventures. It was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2007. In December 2009, Fox's parent company, News Corp, sold Photobucket to Seattle mobile imaging startup Ontela. Photobucket has over 100 million registered users. Photobucket.com
		◊ Google Plus is a social networking site interwoven with the Google platform. Users are able to share images, videos and content updating and share with their 'circles' and others. The site has not lived up to expectations. Google.com
		◊ Digg is ais a social news website. The site's cornerstone function consists of letting people vote stories up or down. called digging and burying, respectively. Many stories get submitted every day, but only the most Dugg stories appear on the front page. Digg's popularity has prompted the creation of other social networking sites with story submission and voting systems. Digg.com
		◊ Foursquare is a location-based social networking website, software for mobile devices and also a game. User's 'check-in' at venues using a mobile website, text messaging or a device-specific application. They are then awarded points and sometimes 'badges'. Local businesses are then able to provide discounts or FREE offers to their customers who check-in in a variety of ways such as Swarm, Friends, Flash and Newbie. Foursquare.com
		◊ Pinterest is a social networking website that uses photographs as its main form of sharing. Users can 'Pin' photos to the boards and then share them with their followers. Pinterest.com

Social Magnet Marketing is an active member with the following professional organizations. Our active involvement in these organizations allows for us to form strategic alliances with other professional in order to provide our clients with partners, vendors and trusted resources.

Local First Arizona
Local First Arizona (LFA) is a non-profit organization working to strengthen communities and local economies through supporting, maintaining, and celebrating locally owned businesses throughout the state of Arizona.

AZIMA (Arizona Interactive Marketing Association)
The Arizona Interactive Marketing Association (AZIMA) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization that helps Arizona agencies, businesses, educational institutions and students improve their understanding and application of interactive marketing best practices.

BNI Arizona (Business Networking International)
BNI is the largest business networking and referral marketing organization in the world.

Astroturfing: fake grassroots campaign that seeks to create the impression of legitimate  buzz or interest in a product, service or idea. Often this movement is motivated by a payment or gift to the writer of a post or comment or may be written under a pseudonym.

Blog: online journal that's updated on a regular basis with entries that appear in reverse chronological order.

Crowdsourcing: harnessing the skills and enthusiasm of those outside an organization who are prepared to volunteer their time contributing content or skills or solving problems.

Feed: format that provides users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a Web feed, enabling users to subscribe to a site's latest content. By using a news reader to subscribe to a feed, you can read the latest posts or watch the newest video on your computer or portable device on your own schedule.

Hastag: community-driven conversation for additional context and metadata to your tweets. Similar to tags on Flickr, you add them in-line to your Twitter posts by prefixing a word with a hash symbol (or number sign). Twitter users often use a hashtag like #socialmagnetmar to aggregate, organize and discover relevant posts.

Microblogging: act of broadcasting short messages to other subscribers of a web service. On Twitter, entries are limited to 140 characters, and applications like Plurk and Jaiku take a similar approach with sharing bite-size media. Probably a better term for this may be 'microsharing.'

Podcast: digital file (usually audio but sometimes video) made available for download to a portable device or personal computer for later playback. A podcast also refers to the show that comprises several episodes. A podcast uses a feed that lets you subscribe to it so that when a new audio clip is published online, it arrives on your digital doorstep right away.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication): Web standard for the delivery of content-blog entries, news stories, headlines, images, video-enabling readers to stay current with favorite publications or producers without having to browse from site to site, blogs and news content using a news reader. All blogs, podcasts and videoblogs contain an RSS feed, which lets users subscribe to content automatically and read or listen to the material on a computer or a portable device. Most people use an RSS reader, or news aggregator, to monitor updates.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM): a series of online tactics that, when combined with SEO, helps to attract customers, generate brand awareness and build trust. SEM (sometimes called search marketing) seeks to increase websites' visibility chiefly through the purchase of pay-per-click ads and paid inclusion.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): is the process of arranging your website to give it the best chance of appearing near the top of search engine rankings. As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content, identifying high-traffic keywords and improving the site's layout and design.

Social Bookmarking: method by which users locate, store, organize, share and manage bookmarks of Web pages without being tied to a particular machine. Users store lists of personally interesting Internet resources and usually make these lists publicly accessible. Delicious is the best known social bookmark site.

Social Media: works of user-created video, audio, text or multimedia that are published and shared in a social environment, such as a blog, podcast, forum, wikl or video hosting site. More broadly, social media refers to any online technology that lets people publish, converse and share content online.

Social Media Optimization (SMO): set of practices for generating publicity through social media, online communities and social networks. The focus is on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.

Social Networking: the act of socializing in an online community. A typical social network such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace or Bebo allows you to create a profile, add friends, communicate with other members and add your own media.

Tags: keywords added to a blog post, photo or video to help users find related topics or media, either through browsing on the site or as a term to make your entry more relevant to search engines.

Troll: someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.

Tweet: a post on Twitter a real-time social messaging system. While all agree on usage of tweet as a noun, people disagree on whether you 'tweet' or 'twitter' as a verb. RT stands for retweet: Users add RT in a tweet if they are reposting something from another person's tweet.

Twitterverse: Akin to blogs and the blogosphere, the Twitterverse is simply the universe of people who use Twitter and the conversations taking place within that sphere.

UGC (User Generated Content):  industry term that refers to all forms of user-generated materials such as blog posts, reviews, podcasts, videos, comments and more.

Web 2.0: refers to the second generation of the web, which enables people with no specialized technical knowledge to create their own websites to self-publish, create and upload audio and video files, share photos and information and complete a variety of other tasks. In this new world, the Internet becomes a platform for self-expression, education and advocacy that 'regular people' can use on their own without having to go to an expert to do it for them in contrast to the less interactive publishing sites of Web 1.0.

Web Analytics: measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purpose of understanding who your visitors are and optimizing your website.

Widget: (sometimes called a gadget, badge or applet) small block of content, typically displayed in a small box, with a specific purpose, such as providing weather forecasts or news, that is constantly updating itself (typically vis RSS). Widgets make it easy to add dynamic content to your site or blog.

Wiki: collaborative website that can be directly edited by anyone with access to it. Small teams often find that they can accomplish a task easier by creating a collaborative online workspace using wiki software such as pbworks, Social text or media wiki.

Word-of-Mouth Marketing: (sometimes called grassroots marketing or conversational marketing) umbrella term for dozens of techniques that can be used to engage and energize customers. By building relationships with influencers through WOM, marketers can get people to become so enthusiastic about a cause, product or service that they drive sales through conversations.

WordPress: popular open source blog publishing application.

Client List:

These businesses are current and/or past clients of Social Magnet Marketing. We have done a variety of work for these small businesses ranging from traditional marketing strategies to website development and digital marketing strategies.