Social media marketing is a term that describes the act of using social networks, online communities, blogs, wikis or any other collaborative Internet form of media for marketing, sales, public relations and customer service. Common social media marketing tools include Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.

Social media marketing has three important aspects:

1. Creating buzz or news worthy events, videos, tweets, or even blog entries that attract attention, and become viral in nature. Buzz is the piece that makes social media marketing work. It replicates a message, not through purchase of an ad, but through user to user contact. The message does not necessarily have to be about the product; many successful viral campaigns have gathered steam through something funny or interesting, with the company logo or tagline included.
   
   
2. Building ways that fans of a brand or company can promote it themselves in multiple online social media venues. Fan pages in Twitter, MySpace of Facebook are exactly this.
   
   
3. It is conversational. Social media marketing is not fully controlled by the organization, it allows for user participation and dialogue. Potentially a badly designed social media marketing campaign can backfire on the organization that created it. That is the reason that SMM campaigns must fully engage and respect the users.

Social network marketing or social level marketing, is an advertising method that makes use of social network service and to increase their web presence. This ranges from simply advertising directly on social networking sites, viral marketing that spreads throughout the web, email, and word of mouth, or providing niche social networking sites focused around the item being advertised.

Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for attracting visitors to website content by promoting and publicizing it through social media. SMO is a subset of social media marketing, which is promoting and publicizing products and services in general through social media. SMO is one of two online methods of optimizing (attracting visitors to) website content; the other method is search engine optimization (SEO).

• Increase your linkability
  
  
• Make tagging and bookmarking easy
  
  
• Reward inbound links
  
  
• Help your content travel
  
  
• Encourage the mashup
  
  
• Get communities connected

There are two categories of SMO methods:

(a) Social media features added to the content itself, including: RSS feeds, social news and sharing buttons, and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and videos

(b) Promotional activities in social media aside from the content being promoted, including: blogging, commenting on other blogs, participating in discussion groups, and posting status updates on social networking profiles

Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.

Social media optimization is in many ways connected as a technique to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites. In a similar way the engagement with blogs achieves the same by sharing content through the use of RSS in the blogosphere and special blog search engines.

Social Media optimization is considered an integral part of an online reputation management (ORM) or Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) strategy for organizations or individuals who care about their online presence.