Heres a fantastic example of a company using social media technology to great potential as part of their website marketing campaign. The people at Handbag Planet were launching a new e-commerce handbag website recently and had a great idea to publicise the new site.

Every hour for the first 24 hours they were giving away a free handbag and they made it easy to enter the competition.

There were several ways to enter, you could visit their website and sign up, refer a friend and you got another chance to win. Or you could enter using a Social Media website.

If you had a Facebook or MySpace account you could add Handbag Planet as a friend or write about them on Twitter and you got 10 chances to win a prize. And if you had a blog you could write about them to receive 25 chances to win the handbag of your dreams!

Now selling handbags is a long way from letting accommodation to students, but their use of the social side of the Internet provides valuable insight into how an effective online marketing campaign can be run. For very little work on their part they managed to get lots of people to link to their new website right across the Internet, greatly increasing their site's visibility and attracting a lot of traffic to it.

With students so prolific in their use of social media websites, this shows just how powerful they can be and is obviously ideal for businesses offering services directly to students.

How would you use social media websites to market your website?