Social networking has grown extraordinarily over the past 10 years.

These sites attract the most traffic worldwide, with Facebook ranked second only to Google, followed by Yahoo and Bing. It is therefore not surprising to see social media gaining greater prominence among online marketing campaigns.

Businesses cannot afford to ignore such a large and affective channel of communication. But this should not be seen as a replacement for more classic Internet marketing tools such as email marketing. Social media should actually be viewed as complementary tool to be used with traditional online marketing methods if the business is going to realise sustainable results.

Social media, despite its reach, provides less flexibility than email marketing. The objective gaining fans, friends, and followers should thus be a gradual process by which you use your already evolved marketing subscription list.

Social media is fundamentally tied to email. All major social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter send an email notification when a private message is sent to you or when another person comments on a photo or a post you had made. Members of social networking sites rely on email to monitor updates.

Because of this recurrent checking of email, online marketers can use this as a way of frequently drawing attention to their email updates and newsletters. The rationale for this is that even when people do sign up for an email newsletter, it is possible that after some time they will stop reading the emails.

By posting links on your social networking site you can increase interest in the email content and in turn increase online sales.

Social media is not only useful for persons that are already on your email subscription list. It is also a great tool to gain new subscriptions. However, this is something that requires a cautious approach. Constantly urging your profile friends, fans and followers to sign up is almost always viewed negatively and will only put them off.

People will be more inclined to sign up for an email newsletter and buy your products or service if you take a professional but participatory approach. Use your profile to talk about interesting themes that are related to your line of business.

If you must persuade people to sign up for your emails, then you must keep requests few and far between. Such requests can come with a preview of the content of your email a week or few days before you send the mail. Then follow this by providing a link to your subscription page for anyone that would want to read the content of the email newsletter in detail.