Social Media Marketing
Social Media websites are recreating the art of marketing
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Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing and website promotion
Social media marketing is a new approach to website promotion that takes advantage of the ability of social media websites to rapidly promote a website to prominence.
Social media are websites which depend on user participation and
user-generated content. They include social networking sites like
Twitter or Facebook, social bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon and Del.icio.us, and social
news sites like Reddit or Digg.
Social media websites already number in the thousands and new ones are added weekly.
Some social media are provided for groups of people who share a common interest, but most of the better known social media websites are not defined by specific areas of interest.
How do social media work?
To play you have to join. Members go through a registration process in which they normally set up a personal profile, indicating personal details and interests. Thereafter they can make posts, and join groups. Groups may be defined by a shared interest or common circumstances.
Groups overlap. Members may directly influence other members of their group, and those members may influence a further set of members in other groups. The potential therefore exists for effective marketing to take place.
Members can generally share links to other websites, and in some cases, vote for or against them, moving the website up or down a list or rank. They also share comments or posts.
Most social media use no-follow links
To discourage spam, most social networks (and many blogs) use only "no follow" links to other websites, which search engines claim to ignore. If the search engines ignore the "no follow" links, then the website being linked to will not benefit from the search engines for that link.
For a website promoter, a no-follow link is far less valuable than a do-follow link, but not completely useless. Although search engines may not follow these links, social media members can and do follow them.
Social media marketing - Does it pay?
In this way, social media can create additional traffic for your website. In the case of a website that is voted to the top of the pile in Digg or StumbleUpon, for a short while there could be thousands of visitors from these sources per day.
But for most websites, the effort required to build traffic using social media marketing strategies is quite considerable, and the returns may be uninspiring.
There are exceptions however. Some websites have learnt to make good use of social media marketing. Usually these are the more frequently updated or interactive websites. If you have such a website, every time your website changes you can create a post in your social networks, drawing attention to the new material.
Twitter is one social network where this strategy can be used to good effect. Your influence on Twitter grows as more twits (I couldn't resist that) elect to "follow" you. The strategy for building your own Twitter following is described in the Links/Resources.
Social Bookmarking
One strategy for using social media marketing, which any website can use, is to provide a Share or Bookmarking button (or buttons) on all its web pages. This button invites members of the social network concerned to create a link to the web page (together with their comments about it) for the benefit of other members.
This encourages other members to visit the web page, especially if the comments were favourable.
This technique can be extended by using a button such as our "Share this Page". This button is provided free by Add This, allowing access to over 50 major social media websites.
Blog commenting
Blogs and other online forums may be useful, especially when they are specialized. If you find blogs that relate to your website topic, the people who read those posts are probably people in your target market.
Become a respected member of these online communities by contributing posts, responding to other posts (commenting), and responding to people who responded to you.
Treat the other members of the blog or forum with respect and be gracious about their posts. Don't try to sell them anything. Don't leave spammy posts.
So how does this all help you market your website?
When you sign on to a blog to make a comment, you can generally include a web page URL. People who follow that blog and see your regular contributions will start to wonder who you are, and click on your name. This will take them to your web page.
This is high quality traffic. That visitor has already learned to respect your opinions and trust you as an authority on your topic from your blog comments. They will trust what you say on your website too.
Blog comments bring search engine respect too
If you select popular blogs, particularly blogs that do not use no-follow links, you will also benefit from the backlink to your website that is left in the blog everytime you comment.
The higher the pagerank of the blog, the greater the benefit to your website. (The search engines pick up the link to your website and count it in your favour.)
This is where we leave social media marketing and turn our attention, in the next tutorial, to using advertising to bring traffic to your website...
Links / Resources
More articles about social media:
Are social media taking over your life?
7 amazing ways to promote your business on Facebook
More articles about no-follow links:
All links are not equal
More articles about using social bookmarking media
How to market a website with Digg
Social bookmarketing and StumbleUpon
How to use social bookmarking to promote your website
More articles about using Twitter:
Twitter marketing-7 steps to promote your business
Creative ways to use Twitter for Marketing and Branding
Podcast: Twitter Search in plain English
Add This - bookmarking and sharing service
More articles on blog comment marketing:
An introduction to blog comment marketing
How to write great blog comments
The importance of commenting on other blogs
How to use online forums to market your website
Software to assist with blog comment marketing:
Blog Comments Demon
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Copyright © 2009 EasyWebsitePrimer.com Last updated: 01 AUG 2009
Use social media marketing to promote your winning website