For the past two centuries, media publishers have controlled the flow of information to and from people. Media giants like News Corporation and Liberty Media control large media distribution networks around the world that distribute news and informational content. While the effectiveness of these media giants will only grow if they use the internet effectively, social media has opened the door for anyone to distribute their content, ideas, and information on a global scale.

This is one of the reasons why social media and social media marketing are so important to many people and businesses. The social web is also great for people and their freedom of expression and information. Social networking sites like Digg, Twitter, and Google+ give you the ability to quickly share or distribute content from your blog or website and broadcast it to the rest of the world. Unlike traditional media, social web users choose which articles are the most interesting by submitting their comments and effectively voting for content. The more users vote for an article, the more traffic that article will get under typical circumstances.

The good thing about this system is that the best content usually goes to the top of the list. The web is so large that it is very difficult for social media marketers to manipulate the amount of votes they need to get their sites to the top of social media syndication before they are caught and banned. Of course, unsurprisingly when the stakes are high, many people try to play with the system on sites like Digg. It’s also fair game with a first page listing on Digg bringing in up to 200,000 unique visitors a day. Sites like Slashdot have had a similar effect that has led to them being the center of attention overnight for some websites and e-businesses.

Even though very few good social media marketing products have been created to help businesses wanting to promote their websites and content, there are some good free tools like Social Bookmarker and AddUrl. Most webmasters and internet marketers have had to use spam software or spend time submitting their content to all the relevant sites. In 2008, a product called Traffic Android was launched that automates the slow process of registering and submitting to social websites. It was supposed to be the first of many useful tools to hit the market; However, other similar tools have been few and far between and the good ones are incredibly expensive.

The ability for webmasters to quickly distribute their content and information is an extremely powerful benefit of web 2.0 and the integration of social media with social media is another step in bringing powerful web content syndication to life. There are tools that integrate Twitter feeds with Facebook news feeds, which is extremely powerful and perhaps the smartest tool ever invented. This means that not only can you distribute your content almost instantly via website social media, but you can also post a link and a short snippet about your content on Twitter and have it distributed through your network of friends on Facebook or vice versa.

While social media marketing is still a very new phenomenon, I hope this illustrates the impact it can have on your website. As the medium evolves and the best search and syndication technologies and rich media grow, their power can only increase. My advice is that it is better to get involved sooner rather than later to get through the learning curve of social media marketing before hundreds of thousands of other webmasters get involved and the big media companies come in and start trying to buy all the major sites. social web.