The old communication experiment where a message is passed on from one person to another always results in a message that is distorted in varying degrees as it is passed along.
While word-of-mouth in the realm of advertising works in some ways, the risk of your message being distorted is always a possibility.
In the internet world, your message is always intact and always in the format you intended it to be in when you use social network marketing.
Social networks are online communities and community websites that are often connected in a network of people with certain demographic profiles.
Optimization for social networks is a good strategy to take in internet marketing.
This optimization is almost the same as viral marketing in that it spreads your message across to various audiences in the internet.
It effectively broadens your market base with a network of audiences that is a demographic fit to your target market.
Using strategies as blogging, file sharing, and linking can be used to take advantage of the wide reach of social networks.
Optimization for social network marketing works the same way as search engine optimization, but it uses links in sources instead of search engines to drive traffic to a site.
In any of these strategies, the most important thing is knowing the kind of market you want to talk to.
This is probably the singular important thing to take into consideration when drawing up your plans for online marketing including viral marketing.
Your choice of networks to tap into and start out your viral marketing campaigns in should be governed by the demographics and psychographics of your target market segment.