Get smart

Marketing through social media could really take off, as long as businesses are clever about how they place their content on social networking websites, according to one expert.

Riley Samuda, sales executives at the Marketer - the official magazine of the Chartered Institute of Marketing - explained that this decision was not about having a "great" banner or a generic online advert, but about integrating a brand with the site in a way that generated good returns.

Fellow Marketer sales executive Ravjeet Kang agreed and said that communicating a business agenda to social media users could pose a "dilemma".

"You've got these mass communications, you've got all these people coming together ... to talk to each other and they're not interested in anything else - they want information from each other," he told attendees of the Technology for Marketing & Advertising event.

The key was finding a way to link the brand and the consumer, he concluded.

According to research by the Participatory Marketing Network, 62 per cent of social media users from the Generation Y age bracket have visited a brand or fan page on a social network and 48 per cent have joined.

Contact the experts at home james for Social Media services.