Social Media Marketing, explained by someone that is actually doing it. Well, at least I tend to think I am; however, the term is VERY broad. In this blog I will outline SOME of the key tools, as well as tracking/analytics utilities. It is very important to know where your users are coming from, what makes them visit, what trends are radiating, and how many click-thrus you are actually getting. You also need to know the importance of building a personal brand online and the public relations aspect that comes along with that. A social media marketer is not your publicist, but it doesn’t mean they don’t need to act like one! They are creating profiles for you across the web where you may voice your opinions as well as helping to syndicate your press releases.
If you have read my blog on Viral Marketing here: http://bit.ly/ftcTH , you understand that there are a myriad of tools associated with a great campaign. Social Media Marketing encompasses the use of a wide range of free web services, you just need to know which ones and why.
Digg and Reddit are similar in that they are both user-generated link sites. Users post the links, and then other users vote the posted links up or down, causing them to become more or less prominent on the home page. It’s basic popularity. Reddit is more focused on the news niche, whereas Digg allows all sorts of links to videos, pictures, etc.It is important that if you have links to blog posts, viral videos, press releases, etc. that you get them on these sites. Not only does having your content in more places help with search engine results, these types of sites have the ability to make a link go viral. If enough people vote you up, you will see the traffic flow in. Mixx is very similar to Digg as well and some tend to think the audience you find there is less tech oriented. Propeller, Sphinn and Yahoo’s Buzz are other example of sites like the previous ones mentioned. Delicious and StumbleUpon are social bookmarking services. They allow users to bookmark links to sites they like and then add commentary, hence the term social. The more popular links make it to the top and if you are in there then you are golden. I’d recommend using both. StumbleUpon makes it easier to quickly bookmark something, but Delicious’s tagging system makes searching for links you’ve bookmarked in the past a lot easier. So far, Delicious is the largest site in the social bookmarking arena.
Yes, this is quite a few sites and believe it or not we have only just begun! To keep track of the Diggs, stumbles, sphinns, etc. you need to get an analytics tool. Social Media Metrics is a Greasemonkey extension that does the job. It adds a social media information layer to Google Analytics.
Before I explain more analytics tools, I want to describe a few more services. There has been a lot of buzz about Twitter lately and let me tell you why it’s important. Twitter is not just another social network like Facebook people! I hate hearing people who claim they won’t use Twitter because they already have Facebook. It’s meant to be used in conjunction. The beauty of Twitter is the ability to setup your own, personalized feed. When the people you follow post updates, you receive them in your feed in near real-time. It’s also not just updates on what people are doing. If you follow a bunch of tech news bloggers for instance, you will see their tweets about the new articles they post 10minutes before they can update into your RSS feed. (near real-time) Now in a practical marketing sense, Twitter is best used to Tweet links. Let’s say for instance that I’m following @mashable, one of my favorite tech blogs. As mentioned above they will tweet links to their latest blog posts as they come out. If I like the link, I can quickly re-tweet it so that everyone following me will see it. If my followers re-tweet it, then all their followers will see it. Now are you starting to understand how things go viral on Twitter?
You want to make sure on Twitter you are driving organic followers. People that actually want to follow you and are interested in what you have to say. By tweeting keywords, users will find you in searches for those topics and may follow you that way. I highly suggest against using services like TweetSpinner to drive followers. Do it legitimately. SocialToo is a web service that sends you a daily email describing follows and unfollows on Twitter.
Another service that is used in conjunction with Twitter is bit.ly. It is a URL shortening service that allows you to shorten a website URL so it’s easier to fit into your limited 140 character long tweet. The advantage to bit.ly is that it provides analytic data for your link. Say for instance you posted a link to a news article on Twitter and shortened it using bit.ly. You can then track it. If you put a plus sign after the bit.ly link it'll give you the analytic data. For example:
Here is the analytic data for the same article: http://bit.ly/WDUtV(Plus_Sign_Here) [This blog isn't currently supporting the insertion of the actual plus sign lol]
Also keep an eye out for Bit.ly Now, a confirmed competitor to user-generated link sites like Digg. Unlike Digg, Bit.ly Now will be able to predict what links are about to go viral. Twitter’s trending topics give you a good idea of what links are being tweeted a lot, but Bit.ly Now will be able to segment out the ones that have actually been clicked, a HUGE advantage to what Twitter offers.
FriendFeed is sort of a competitor to Twitter and many people like it better because of the content that it pulls into the feed. As a social aggregator, FriendFeed allows you to stream content from your YouTube, Delicious, blog, Flickr, etc. in your feed. Twitter doesn’t even display external content linked into tweets, but framing services like Tweettree.com solve this problem. As a social media marketer, I believe it’s important to be on every service imaginable. Nowadays, with data portability, services like Friendfeed will auto-update your Twitter and Services like Twitter will update your Facebook status, etc. so you don’t have to worry about logging into every account.
As a social media marketer, blogging is very important for your clients. You must remember that blogging encapsulates delayed gratification. In the long-tail approach, your blog will pay off. As you build a subscription base, you will also gain a lot of fans that like your posts for their content. Make sure not to advertise in blog posts and typically provide compelling information that is useful. The first rule to networking is to add value before asking for anything. By blogging, you are essentially emitting free advice on a topic of your choosing, but people who read your blog will also respect you as an expert in your particular knowledge base. These fans can later become clients. Take for instance the post you are reading now. Some of my readers may not understand half of what I’m talking about, but the next time they need to hire a social media marketing consultant I hope they think of me : )
If you don’t have a blog, I suggest taking a look at sites like Tumblr and Posterous. They allow you to create a blog very quickly. Although Tumblr has great tools for customization, Posterous is my personal favorite because it attacks social media publishing. In order to post to your Posterous blog, all you have to do is e-mail the content to Posterous. It is then published to all the supported services. For example:
When I emailed the set of pictures from my iPhone it automatically added them to an album on my Facebook, put it in my FB mini-feed and then tweeted it on my Twitter account. You can also post straight to your Tumblr blog as well. They currently support several services including YouTube and Vimeo for videos, Flickr and Picassa for photos, and other blog sites like Wordpress and Blogger. Again I will reiterate. BE EVERYWHERE!
Video is a huge area. A lot of people think that creating a Facebook Fan page and a Twitter account will make them cover all bases. Clearly, this is not the case. Take advantage of viral video. When you create your video, make sure to link it on all the major social media sites, but also make sure to aggregate it to accounts on all the major video sites as well. There are several services that do this:
TubeMogul, Hey!Spread, Vidmetrix, SEnuke, Video Post Robot, VideoUploadPro, TrafficGeyser, ContentBuzz, VideoWildFire, Mpoint, and Videooptimize are a few.
The differences are in the service offerings and the cost. Some of these services offer analytics while some just post. Most all of them charge a fee though.
If video analytics is a problem, a great company called Visible Measures will work wonders for you. They are only focused on large media publishers that are pushing out loads of content, but they also own a smaller service called VidMeter, which helps smaller sites.
Finally, when I am on the topic of analytics I want to mention brand monitoring. Due to the nature of the internet becoming more social, the chatter online can sometimes tell us what a consumer is thinking about our brand (sentiment), helping us better gauge our customer’s opinions. Although for bigger brands I recommend a consumer listening engine, as described by my brother here: http://bit.ly/9yWac , there are smaller utilities that can be utilized as well. Google Alerts will e-mail you every time your company name is indexed on Google. This is good for tracking down press releases that mention you. Technorati, which is the largest blog search engine, will track blogs that link to yours. You can directly search for your brand or subscribe to RSS and be notified when someone blogs about you.
In conclusion, I think it’s best to get yourself out there but be careful how to portray your brand. Create compelling content so users retweet it and click “like” on Facebook. Make sure to really attack the blogosphere as well as syndicate your content through all the social channels. Also make sure to realize that a good social media marketing manager is going to know all of this and more. Feel free to contact me if you need help, and have a great time marketing! You can find me on Twitter: @zachhurst
