subject: The ABC's Of Social Media Marketing [print this page] The ABC's Of Social Media Marketing The ABC's Of Social Media Marketing
Everybody who creates content and publishes it online wants their content to "go viral", to achieve one million views or more, with the obvious benefit being greater exposure for their business, product or service and media recognition. However saying that you want your content to "go viral" is like saying that you want to write a best selling book, it's something that everybody wants but it's not as easy as it would first seem, it takes time, effort and money.
The Publish And Pray Method Of Social Media Marketing
Unfortunately a lot of people tend to go with the "build it and they will come" or the "publish and pray" method of marketing. They believe that if they just publish some really great content that they will automatically get lots of views and that their content will go viral. Whilst this does happen from time to time, in the vast majority of cases it does not, however if you are really persistent it is possible.
Passive Versus Active
The way to make this happen is to actually spend time promoting your content, so don't just always be publishing content, spend time promoting it also, in fact for every hour that you spend producing content you should also spend one hour promoting it, at the very least spend just as much time promoting your content as you do creating your content and there are two main ways to promote your content through passive social media marketing and through active social media marketing.
Passive social media marketing involves status updates, syndication and sharing whilst active social media marketing involves advertising, back linking and community building.
Passive Social Media Marketing
1. Status Updates - There is a reason why they call it a "Status Update", it's because the more you talk about your topic or area of interest the more your status, credibility and authority within that market will increase, the more you talk about it, the more visible you will become and the more others will turn to you when they are looking for tips and advice on that particular topic, it's a self fulfilling prophecy, so at the very bare minimum you want to have at least three social networking accounts setup and you want to start posting regular status updates, tips and advice on your chosen line of business. I would recommend starting out with FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn if you don't have accounts for those social networks set up already.
2. Sharing - This is commonly referred to as social bookmarking where you make it easy for others to share your content with their friends / fans / followers. At the very least you will want to have a Twitter ReTweet button and a FaceBook like button on your website so that people who like your content can share it with their friends. There are also other services that are available that allow you to social bookmark your content to dozens of different social bookmarking sites all at once, whilst this is great and I love being able to automate the whole social bookmarking process I also strongly suggest that you update your top three social networks manually because that is usually the sites where your friends / work associates are and you don't want to seem like too much of a weirdo on those sites, for me it's FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
3. Syndication - Many social media websites allow you to syndicate your content, for instance when you watch a YouTube video they often give you the "embed code" which allows you to take someone else's video and display it on your website. By syndicating your content you're allowing others to effectively share your content to their friends / fans / followers and on their own domain and because it's your content you can place your website address and a call to action on it to get visitors to go to your website or whatever if they are interested in learning more. Syndicating your content is really one of the most powerful forms of social media marketing and it's something that you can do not only for videos but for audio and written content also.
Alright so these are the passive forms of social media marketing, they are passive in the sense that you just do it once, set and forget so to speak, the next three tips relate to active social media marketing, they are active in the sense that you should be doing them often and for as long as possible or at least until you reach your goal of one million views or whatever.
Active Social Media Marketing
1. Advertising - Once you've created a really good piece of content and it's actually generating you some leads and sales, then it's really time to expand it "let your winners run" and advertise it until it stops generating you leads and sales or until you create an even better piece of content that generates you even more leads and sales. Few bloggers would actually consider advertising their blogs but trust me the professionals do it and that is how they can achieve hundreds of thousands of views. The key is to create some content that is great but also timeless so whether the reader is looking at your content now or in a year's time, it's still relevant.
2. Back Linking - Back linking means that you go to other people's websites, blogs and forums and start posting links back to your content. Of course there is a right way and a wrong way to do this. If you simply join a forum and start posting links straight away then you are going to be seen as a "spammer" or "troll". The key is to think of each website, blog or forum that you want to post links on as a "karma bank" every time you help someone else you are depositing karma into the karma bank and every time you help yourself you are taking out karma from the karma bank, so you want to spend eighty per cent of your time depositing karma and creating good will and twenty per cent of your time promoting yourself, in fact, the less time you spend promoting yourself the better because the impact that you make from spending most of your time contributing and helping others will amplify your results that much more.
3. Community - Every online marketer these days is trying to create a community of customers and raving fans for their products and services who will support them and most importantly buy their stuff. It's a goal worth striving for because once you reach a critical mass the community will become self sustaining and you being the leader of the community will benefit from the increased exposure, sales, leads and referrals that come with that. So find out where your prospects are spending their time and start up a group, list or fan page, at first it may seem like a bit of a chore if you only have a few people following you but once you reach a critical mass it will be well worth it, just to put it into perspective, in order to get a book publishing deal you only need to sell ten thousand books and if you can say to the book publishing company that you have ten thousand fans / followers then guess what? You're probably going to get your book published because you have proven to them that there is a market for your book!
The Holy Grail
Alright, if you are looking to reach the "holy grail" of viral marketing then I wish you the very best of luck, I know that it's an absolutely worthwhile goal because I've got friends who have built communities of 30,000+ and even 500,000+ members and I've seen how this has transformed their lives, their careers and their businesses and that's why I'm in the game also. So hopefully this has provided you with some insight on social media marketing and how to become more "popular" or "famous" online, as you can see, it's really just as simple as A,B,C!
