It is the use of social media sites to mushroom your website’s visibility on the internet and to promote contents, commodities and services without paying large advertisement fees. SMM uses podcasts, wikis (e.g. Wikipedia and Wetpaint), blogs (e.g. Mashable and Boing Boing), video sharing (like YouTube), photo sharing (like Flicker), news sharing, message boards, and posts on social networking sites to reach spontaneously a large or intended audience.

It permits the consumers to rate and review products, advise fellow users, and even make their own mercantile praising or smashing businesses and trademarks.

Here’s a look at the top thespians in SMM.

Facebook
The most used, and celebrated social networking site. You can join groups, place links in your profiles, post on walls, and find new friends. Explore groups and exploit the bells and whistles. Make your own groups and pages, and post your links there. Remember, pages are more customizable than groups. And, if your promotion depends heavily on cyclic communication with large numbers of people, pages are certainly your finest option.

Some tips for promoting your pages.

• Share/Post your page on your Facebook profile. It will magnetize more friends and profile visitors to the page.
• Email the page URL to your mailing list, and invite contacts to become Facebook “Fans” of your page.
• Buy social ads to promote your page.
• Insert the Facebook’s “Send Button” and “Like Button” on your website. These Icons will be a huge aid in the attempt to get readers sharing your posts on Facebook.
• If you sell something, then use Facebook shop now store and add your products online.
• Get eminence in Facebook users’ News Feed Distribution (NFD). Start your group, invite friends, create regular events within your group, and message your group members regularly.

Also Read- How to improve your Facebook Page and Facebook Page Likes

Twitter
Quickly becoming Facebook’s number one competitor, Twitter is a micro-blogging site - meaning you can express your thoughts, news, views, opinions and links, but in a nutshell.

Post a tweet (or message), reply and send direct messages, or re-tweet by repeating what another user has said. Whatever you tweet; just leave your URL with it. And remember, you only have 140 characters to play with, so make them count. Use URL shortening applications like www.tinyurl.com.

StumbleUpon
This site is about polling and commenting on websites. It can be a striking source of traffic for fresh, exhilarating, creative, or undiscovered websites. Set up a complete profile and start building a “Discovery” list of websites. Comment on other discoveries and contribute in the community.

Flickr/Snapfish/Photobucket
These are the popular picture-sharing sites. They have titanic search ability, and can truly grab some eyeballs. Be informative on the profile. Be very expressive on the pictures, structuring of the pictures, and tagging of the pictures. Place your website URL on your pictures before sharing them.

Other than these widely popular social sites, there are many different ways to perk up your online content propagation. Link exchange sites like easyhits4u.com, paid-to-click sites like neobux.com, paid-to-signup, banner hosting services, search engine optimization, using better keywords in content, title and mega tags, online chat, offering freebies, email marketing, safelist submitters, and offline advertising can fetch quality traffic for your content.

For touching the high heavens of popularity with your website content, certain nuts and bolts should be kept in mind, always.

• Follow the basics first. Remember the two all important C’s: consumer and content. Play in their half: publish what they want to read. “Content holds the aces,” so develop exciting and highest quality content, only.
• Be alive, and active. Interact with your readers consistently through forums, customer services and emails. Request feedback's, and keep them interested, curious and engaged by sharing your upcoming road-maps.
• Start with small steps and work up your success. Contribute, collude, inform, explain but do not spam. Never abuse the email, comments, or bulletins. When using SMM, read the website’s Terms of Services (TOS) properly before trying anything fancy.
• Dream big, but keep it simple: big words never produce big influence. Fine-tune the write-up to satisfy the experts, as well as dummies like me. No point writing something which glides way over its reader’s skull.
• Do not get exaggerated. Your communication should be gracious, and free from arrogance and attitude.
• Do not dread experiments, but anticipate and appreciate the outcomes quickly. Set logical, feasible goals and develop a suitable plan to accomplish them.
• Give them a breather: do not overload your content.
• Start with a minimal investment in time and money. Be truthful and authentic.
• Keep publishing. Keep marketing. And let the traffic cascade.