Participation is key to successful SMM
Posted by Kim Gordon on 03 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: Social Media
After reading an online article last week that guided the reader through the process of setting up a social media profile on seven different social network forums, I came to the conclusion that simply signing up on these platforms is not going to do much for you or your brand. Participation is the key.
The author of the post, Esteban Panzera, believes these are great places to acquire links that are relevant to your site`s content, which I agree with, as they create a gateway for outsiders to connect to your website. I also believe that there is more to be done on these social platforms in order to get people to find your profile unique and then follow the link to your site. By connecting to the sites that he suggests, such as Flickr, LinkedIn, Stage6 (shutting down on 28 Feb), Del.icio.us, Squidoo, Mixx, and Reddit, your site may reap some benefits by having a link on their site because of their authority status. This, however, may be helpful for the Google spiders to crawl your site, but it may still be up to luck for your peers or potential customers to find you among one of the other thousands of profiles on these social media platforms.
Some might think it a fantastic idea to link to as many social media sites as possible because of their “free” publicity. But do you really think it is going to be of benefit to you to try and keep ten profiles up-to-date, active and unique? As time goes on, there will be more and more companies signing up with the same target words and profile names as you. This leaves the consuming task of having to make your ten profiles stand out from the crowd and grab those viewers who may come across it. Signing up on ten different social media sites will ultimately occupy a fair amount of your time, especially if you are planning on keeping the sum of these profiles characteristic of your unique business and brand.
Participation on these social sites is imperative if you are aiming to increase the reputation of your own site. Connections need to be made with other community members, and these relationships need regular nurturing so that your peers see you as a respectable leader in the industry and naturally spread your brand for you through viral marketing. You need to help create ‘talk` about your brand. Give them reason to talk about you, for example, add interesting, informative videos to YouTube, and maybe make a few educated ‘shocking` comments on hot topics that are being discussed on these sites.
Social Media Marketing (and SMO) is an important aspect of any website owner`s eMarketing strategy. Choose a social media platform that best caters for your business sector, and that will attract your chosen target market. Then all that is left to be done is to develop your profile into a gateway to your site.
