Social Media Tips - Part 2

Social networking can take up rather large chunks of your time, especially if you are trying to keep up with more than one social site. The key is to achieve 80% of the results with just 20% of the effort.

While these social media tips will help you get the most out of your marketing efforts, remember that high-quality traffic really comes down to two tasks.

1. Writing interesting content that encourages the search engines to list your pages.
   
   
2. Generating visitor reaction that tells the search engines people like your site.

Google, for example, monitors the number of incoming links to your site as well as how many people come to your site and how long they stay. These factors are known as off-page criteria. Success on the Internet is all about creating the types of content that your customers and prospects will want to read.

If your site has poor content or is difficult to navigate, you'll have a tough time generating any kind of traffic, whether it be organic search engine traffic or social network traffic.

This article will take a look at three important social media tips that will give you the biggest bang for your buck.

Strategy #1: Social Bookmarking

If you've ever bookmarked a web page on your web browser, then you are already familiar with the concept. A social bookmark is similar, but the bookmark itself appears on a publicly accessible social media site. Other people can then see the bookmark and be exposed to your content.

Some social sites allow other users to vote on the bookmark, thus pushing it up (or lowering it) in the ranking system. As a bookmark receives more votes, it's prominence on the social site increases and will drive more and more people to your site. The ultimate is to have one of your bookmarked pages appear on the homepage of a social site.

If you want someone to bookmark a page on your site, make it easy for them to do so. This means you should provide social bookmark buttons on each content page of your site.

Below is what my social bookmark buttons look like for this site.

If you scroll down to the bottom of any of my content pages, you will see this very same set of social bookmark buttons. These buttons are a proprietary design by Site Build It!. If you don't use Site Build It!, you won't be able to use this exact same setup.

Fortunately, there are many free social bookmarking scripts out there and all you need to do is paste a bit of script into your web pages. One that I like very much is ShareThis. I use this system on my SmallBiz Marketing Blog.

Sign up for your free ShareThis account, select the social bookmarking sites you wish to include, and obtain the script code to paste into your web pages. I recommend pasting the code at the very end of your content so visitors easily see it when they finish reading your page.

Below is what opens up for your visitors once they click the ShareThis link (circled in red.)

This nice thing about ShareThis is that you can also add links for email, AIM, Google Bookmarks and a host of other socially related vehicles. It's really a one-stop shop for sharing your website content with others.

Strategy #2: Write Great Content

If your content isn't compelling, useful or interesting enough, no one will want to bookmark it in the first place. Social traffic is looking for something fun and new. If you don't have it, you'll find people leaving your site within 10-15 seconds of arriving.

A great resource I've found for writing solid web content is Ken Evoy's book The Netwriting Masters Course (just right-click the link and save this free PDF book to your desktop.)

Ken Evoy is the creator of Site Build It! and while this book has quite a few references to his product, it stands alone as a great guide on how to write strong and compelling content for your web pages.

Strategy #3: Seed Your Social Networks

If you sprinkle a few "seeds" outside of your website, you might be surprised at the growth you can nurture.

Seeding your best site content is one of the more time consuming social media tips, but it still falls within our 80-20 rule of using your time as efficiently as possible while maximizing results.

The first step is to identify the various social networks that make sense for your target market. To get you going, here is a lit of the most popular social networking sites along with their main focus. Thanks to Vladimir Prelovac for compiling this list.

Pick 5 or 6 sites that are most relevant to your products and services and set up accounts and profiles with each. For each of your profiles, add the URL of your homepage to your public bookmarks. In addition, bookmark two or three additional high-quality content pages.

Do not, under any circumstances, add all your web pages as public bookmarks. If you do, your submissions will most likely be considered spam and you'll get banned from the site. I've seen this happen to some high-profile sites that have gotten a bit too aggressive with their social marketing tactics. A less aggressive approach is definitely the way to go.

When you add a few pages to each of your public bookmarks, be sure to add relevant Tags to your pages. Tags are simply short phrases that describe your page content. They help identify your page content to other users. Each social site is unique in how you tag and bookmark your pages so take your time and follow the site's procedures carefully.

Be sure to search around and bookmark other interesting websites you find. When people see you have other sites bookmarked besides your own, you'll increase the trust factor.

Finally, you may remember in Part 1 of this series, Intro to Social Media Marketing, I mentioned that many search engines do not follow links from the profile pages of social sites. The value in seeding your best content is not as a link building tool, but rather, as a means to share your interesting content with real people, who may then bookmark and vote positively for your content, helping it to spread across the social network.

Creating and maintaining profiles on 5 or 6 top sites and seeding your content is a smart strategy for virtually every small business owner. Social media traffic can be quite fickle, but that doesn't mean you should completely ignore it. Just realize that social media marketing is just one small component of a comprehensive and integrated marketing program.

Follow the above social media tips and get maximum benefit with minimal effort!

Part 3 of this series discusses strategies for Optimizing Social Media.