Social Media Marketing – Oops! I Found You
If were to close my eyes and think about social media marketing right now and try to conjure an image of what social media marketing would be like IF it were a human being, I think it would be someone like this – someone who runs for his or her life whenever he or she encounters another human species that cannot be clicked on, cannot be deleted, and if this other human species is talking, as opposed to typing, life is over. It’s over.
As with many other search engine specialists on this planet, we’re really trying to think out of the norm here. Are the days for search engine optimization really over now that social media marketing is ALMOST EVERYTHING? Is Google going to finally fold because you can’t chat, poke, superpoke, comment, bite, sucker-punch or play mob wars with Google?
The ‘Oops, I found you’ social media marketing method
Well, it’s not really called the ‘oops’ method – it’s just that I find it ironic and a very pertinent description of social media marketing and link building. With social media marketing becoming so intensely popular because of the nose-diving economy, I’d like to take some time to write about what I think of some link building social media sites that we have today. They’re underutilized, you see. Well, in my part of the world it is, anyway.
In this article, I’ll leave Facebook out of the picture. Instead, I’d like to move into the micro, smaller but no-less-efficient social media marketing sites like delicious, digg, stumbleupon, furl, twitter, propeller and Yahoo!’s new baby, Buzz.
Actually, this is merely a small part of social media marketing and some people, more specifically, refer to it as social bookmarking because that’s exactly what it is! You bookmark things that you like (or boast about your own articles there) and share it with the network of people you have on that minisite. Brilliant. Just like Facebook but on a smaller scale.
Delicious is one of the original site like this and at that time, I wasn’t even aware that it was part of the social media marketing precinct – I merely went on to bookmark everything I wanted there and started to see some changes. Yahoo! saw the potential and acquired delicious some years back and it’s STILL the number one social bookmarking site that we have on the internet today. It’s seamless and absolutely hassle-free. According to some, there are more than three million people using this social media marketing website and more than one hundred million tagged links in there!
Downloading the ‘instant tag’ browser tool bar
If a social media marketing website does NOT have that one-click thing for you download onto your browser, forget it…no one else is going to bother with it and you’ll be wasting your time there.
Download it and whenever you see something of interest, click the button and you’ll automatically add that link, together with your comments into your profile.
Just like all other social media marketing websites, it helps to have some friends on your network. I am speaking beyond just delicious here. Whether it’s your Facebook, twitter, digg, furl, buzz or whatever, the upshot is far greater when you have friends in there.
Oopsie, I stumbled onto your website or article
With a little bit of a twist to social media marketing, we have something called stumbleupon which….well, explains itself. It helps you stumbleupon websites, videos, images, web content or downloadable stuff when you’re bored (or trying to pretend to work as your boss heads out for his break).
If you’ve downloaded the stumbleupon toolbar, click on an icon (they’re neatly classified under each of their own categories) and you’ve stumble upon site or blogs that may be of interest to you. Many people find interesting stories to read or things to learn through stumbleupon.
How do you use this new social media marketing thing then?
This ties in brilliantly with the stuff that you post online…an article, a YouTube video, a blog entry ranting about the army of ants you’ve just killed in the kitchen or your broken fingernail…you bookmark them, post them up in these sites.
If you think article marketing is going to make you the next Donald Trump, you’ve got another tank coming at you! Here’s what you do…
You write the article, you post it up on one of your favorite article directory(ies), go to your published article, bookmark and link each and every single one of them into those social media marketing websites.
Spend a little bit of time going through the other stuff posted there, mingle around a little and add people to your network. Do this consistently over a couple of months, THEN you’ll see the difference.
