Evangelizing Social Media Marketing and the benefits it brings!
My first post in 2008 will be about the value of SSM or for you 3 letter acronym haters “Social Media Marketing.” I have repeatedly evangelized the intrinsic worth of social media communities and there role in today’s Internet marketing.
Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through various social media channels. It is simply another SEO strategy of obtaining links, getting attention and if done right can lead to a massive amount of free traffic. The key here is learning how to harness this low-cost promotional method. This entails understanding the concept of viral content, link baiting and a through understanding of the social media channel you are engaging.
What is viral content? Viral content is self-propagating practice or pattern of Internet use that moves from person to person. Viral content is a brilliant concept and is especially important when you’re looking for traffic or attention which is at the heart of SSM right? Viral content engages the reader, viral content is what people vote on, and it is what they bookmark and share with their friends and family. Viral content tends to spark emotions and debate. Crafting Viral Content takes time and care to produce, and it shows in the finished product. Viral content is also the foundation of a good linkbaiting campaign.
The next question I always get is what is linkbait? Link bait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Link-bait is a component of SEO and marketing, link baits work to increase inbound links, organic search and referral traffic to a site. Link baiting from social media marketing produce two types of traffic sources. The first traffic source is the direct result of your social media campaign you simply get a large amount of visitors who come from the social media channel itself. The secondary traffic is considered referral traffic, because it comes from webmasters which read your post on the social site and decided they wanted to blog about your viral content, company or point of view. These inbound links have several benefits the first being the increase in visitors (free traffic) and the second comes from the direct result of multiple inbound links. Soon the Google Gods will bless you with higher PR ratings to your internal pages.
Ok, I hear what some of you are saying out there… Richard I now understand what viral content is and how link baiting works tell me more about the benefits!
Here are a few:
- SSM provides a low-cost promotional method
- Increase in links
- Increase in Search Engine Rankings
- Generates two types of traffic - Direct traffic and Referral traffic
- Helps build your brand awareness
- Helps build awareness in your website, product or service
- Helps build your reputation management or company (profiles)
- Increase word of mouth
- Increase in bookmarks or social tagging
- Increase in RSS Subscribers
- Helps build community popularity
Conclusion, as you can see the benefits of marketing in the social media channels are far too numerous to sit on the sidelines and not participate. Create a strategy; pick a social media channel to target. Read blogs on how to market successful within each of the major social media channels. (i.e. Digg, Reddit, Facebook, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn &, del.icio.us) Once you start you will see the benefits begin to grow and grow and in no time you will be a SMM master!
To help get you started on your SMM adventures read these five marketing articles!
1. How to Become a Digg Top User (without doing anything shady)
2. Reddit - Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About It
3. Internet Marketers Guide to StumbleUpon
4. 12 Ways to Use Facebook Professionally
5. Effective Marketing on LinkedIn
On a side note, with all of the above, it is important to find as many ways as possible to track the success of your social media campaign. Tracking the success of your campaign comes in many forms and depends on your goals. I will touch upon SMM ROI tracking in a future post!
Also read: Social Media Optimization (SMO) using Social Bookmarking