What is the benefit of social media marketing?

[Robin]

[Bob]

social media marketing offers many ways to generate these links for little or no cost – articles, social media sites and blogs are just a few examples. Social bookmarking is another.

With bookmarking, you save bookmarks to blog posts, articles and web pages (including your own). You tag them with a “keyword” of your own choosing (preferably related to your business). You can then add a “tag cloud” to your website. The tag cloud contains the tags you have created and directs users to the bookmarks you have saved for that tag.

For more details http://www.readyourarticles.com/Art/386/...-Free.html

[marcportugal]

Here are some basic benefits:

Little to no start-up cost.
Little to no ongoing cost.
Easy to use.
Easy to change/update.
Easy to customize.
Easy to share.
Allows "customers" to generate content that can be evaluated for best practices/strategies.
Probability of user frequency (at least for FB, Twitter and LinkedIn.)
Low cost of advertising.
Geo-targted advertising.

Measurability (basic - see below - there are software developers with programs that profess to "quantify" social media conversations - haven't used it...):

Number of Facebook Friends (general)
Number of Twitter Followers (general)
Number of LinkedIn Connections
Number of YouTube Videos
Number of YouTube page views
Number of Blog Followers
Number of Blog Page Views.
Number of Blog Comments.
Number of Facebook Friends (by a certain date/time, after an event.)
Number of Twitter Followers (by a certain date/time, after an event.)
Search results/page rank/quality score of social media sites.
Number of offline actions/redemptions per social media platform (i.e. print & present, etc.)