Web marketers who view social media as a promotional tool can be roughly divided into three categories:
1) Those who blatantly spam (in a hope to get quick traffic). They usually have no valuable content to offer the community and their main goal is to get people click on an ad.
2) Those who link bait (hoping that their article will generate some links from other bloggers). These webmasters usually focus on a catchy scandalous headlines with no truly valuable post following it;
3) Those who strive to become a part of the community and establish business or friendly connections with niche webmasters.
The third approach takes much time and effort and therefore people tend to choose either of the first two. However what seems to be easier has little [or no] effect.
By doing social bookmarking for traffic or spamming friends with “visit-my-site” private messages webmasters usually see low conversions as people participating in social media are “experienced surfers” – they don’t click on ads. So in this perspective, this traffic is worthless (sorry, Tad) these are only “casual visitors”. What is more, this method can hurt a brand, if a well known expert resorts to spamming.
Edgy headlines with no worth-to-pay-attention-to post below will generate minor or no inlinks as webmasters link to quality and useful resources. Besides even if your article is a state of art it is most likely to be buried without niche experts’ support.
This brings us to the third category of “socializers” who prove to be most successful in achieving all the above aims plus in building reputation, trust and brand awareness. The main rule here is when you start your social media campaign (I mean both social bookmarking and social networks, and even blog commenting), don’t expect fast results. Don’t measure the success of your social activity by mere numbers (traffic, feed subscribers or inbound links). Try to think in a different way. Each time when you want to measure your success, ask yourself the following questions:
– Which new marketing strategies did I learn from my social media activity?
– How do my social media friends evaluate my blogging activity?
– Did I manage to get noticed by a niche influencer(s)?
If you remain active and persistent, you will soon have more questions to answer and more pleasant for an eye statistics to look into. Being backed by niche experts and friends is the huge treasure which will help you throughout the time. Thanks to them you will soon see:
– People searching Google for your name;
– Your brand name being recognized;
– Niche influencers linking to your website and citing your posts;
– Friends asking you for a favor and helping you in return;
– Active social media participants helping you to promote your articles;
– Plenty of other direct and indirect benefits of your social media activity.
Update: please sphinn the post (kindly submitted by Tad)
