Patience! You need a lot of patience when it comes to social media marketing! This technique is very ambiguous and might take a while to start paying dividends.
Cross bookmarking is also an important step to implement in your campaigns. I eventually got my traffic running from social networking sites other then Facebook and Twitter after 6 months of continuous posting and good SEO. Also try pinging the bookmarks which you post on these sites, instead of just pinging your article
When you do social marketing, it's easier to already have a small audience before you use it. Otherwise, you'll have an empty page with few followers on any networking site.
Pinging plays an important role in any campaign whether it be article marketing or social bookmarking, famous sites like digg, delicious, stumbleupon etc... gets 1000's of daily submissions and search engines don't even crawl half of them, when you ping your bookmarks you are kinda ensuing its discovery to the crawlers which is a good thing as far as s.e.o is concerned! i would recommend using mass ping tools for the same such as pingfarm[dot]com.
social media marketing helps u build up a parallel stream of web page visitors who do not visit ur website thru any search engine results, but who find ur link on various social media discussion groups and follow that link to ur website. linkedin, facebook, myspace, amplify offer u the opportunity to join ur related groups and submit ur link there.
I agree with you prof, we need to patient. If we're doing seo, one of the most important aspects to ponder is patience.
Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. free classified ads
If you mean what is important when it comes to marketing on social media sites like FB, I would say building relationships with your friends. There are so many people trying to promote on FB that many people are very leery of trusting a product or service from someone they don't know well enough to trust. If you take the time to make quality posts and comments, and are genuinely helpful in your participation, you will get a reputation as someone who is genuine and trustworthy, and that will definitely affect your marketing success. I have seen this happen over and over again, particularly on FB. I think that with all of the new hyped up marketing methods being discussed, the old-school method of getting your name out there and becoming associated with quality and value is too often overlooked. I hope this is helpful.
1. Separate your personal FB from your Business FB 2. Create a Fan Page 3. Drive a ton of traffic to your fan page 4. Find pages with the same topic as yours and request all of those people that "like" that fan page to be your friends (most will accept) 5. Don't oversell or overhype anything....just network like crazy. Hope this helps.