You are in a position where you have just launched a website for your event planning business and are looking to generate additional traffic and attention. One technique you can use to gain traffic and attention to your site is through utilizing social media marketing methodologies.

Social media refers to sites that rely on user-generated content for their principle usage which is a defining feature of the modern internet. User generated content can refer to anything from uploading videos to YouTube to updating your status on Facebook to reviewing a restaurant. This is important as it can pave the way for an effective viral marketing campaign to boost the mind share of your event planning business at a comparatively low cost and through a mutually beneficial exchange with your own fans. The synergistic effect comes with positive press from your fans and from your fans being able to recommend their friends and contacts to you. Many forward-thinking businesses have successfully harnessed the power of generating hype through viral campaigns.

A plethora of sites exist and have become ubiquitous in our daily lives and have contributed toward making us a more “connected” world. These sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and LinkedIn each come their own advantages and disadvantages and are tailored to their own niches which can help you focus on a certain demographic group that is more likely to use your service. For example if you are targeting corporate events planning, you would think of using LinkedIn as it contains the most direct online categorization and organization of corporate employees. If you are targeting college students to promote events at a new club your first instinct would be to look to Facebook and Twitter.

Universal benefits of social media include reach and accessibility. With increasing amount of users on social networking sites you can reach a potentially global audience. With additional impressions with minimal up front investment. Furthermore the more popular social networks are already accessible on a wide range of platforms including smart phones, tablet PCs, etc. This means it is easy to aggregate a large range of user generated content on short notice even when they are not near a computer with an internet connection.

Social media websites feed into the discovery of new content as users generate information in bits designed to share a collective aggregate narrative over time. These narratives will continuously build links to help create synergy with your internal search engine optimization initiatives.