Social Media steps for 2012
Following are strategic steps you should take (if you haven’t already) to ensure you’re poised for social media marketing and content marketing success in 2012 and beyond (adapted from 30-Minute Social Media Marketing, McGraw-Hill 2010; and Content Marketing for Dummies, Wiley 2011).
1. Begin with Branding
The first step to joining the digital age and starting your journey on the social Web is to evaluate your own brand promise. How do you want to position yourself in the marketplace? A focused brand is a strong brand, so determine your niche and use it as your primary brand message and image.
Your audience needs to develop expectations for your brand in order to develop loyalty to it and feel secure enough in your brand message to talk about it with their own friends and connections, particularly across the social Web. You must meet audience expectations in every brand interaction or they will feel confused and turn away from your brand in search of another that does consistently meet their expectations. Don’t let your audience get away. Determine your brand promise and position and stick to it at all times.
2. Create Your Branded Online Destinations
Once you know how you want to position your brand in your audience’s minds, you can create your own branded online destinations. The destination you choose to start with is up to you and depends on the types of tools you enjoy using and feel like you can stick with for the long-term. Start a blog, create a Twitter account, get on Facebook, connect with people on LinkedIn, and get active on Google+.
Most importantly, choose one branded online destination to be your core branded online destination. This is the place where all of your online content and conversations will lead back to. It will be the central hub of your online presence and will become the go-to place for people to learn anything and everything about your brand. I recommend a blog for a core branded online destination because blogs are so search engine friendly and flexible, but the choice is yours. The most important factor is that your core branded online destination is kept fresh with new content that effectively represents your brand promise and invites interaction and sharing.
3. Find Your Best Audience
Who do you want to connect with online in order to build your brand, business and career? You can engage with existing and potential clients, online influencers, experts, customers, and more on the social Web. You simply need to determine who you want to talk to and go out and find them. Visit Google.com and type in the keywords your audience is likely to use to find brands, businesses, content and conversations like yours. Follow the links. Chances are you’ll end up finding multiple sites where your target audience already spends time.
When you find your target audiences’ online hangouts, spend some time listening to the conversations happening on those sites. What topics are important to them? What gets them excited? This type of information-gathering is extremely valuable and allows you to create your own content strategy to best meet your target audience’s existing wants and needs.
4. Join the Conversation
Look for social destinations such as blogs, Twitter profiles, Facebook pages, forums, and so on where you can interact with other people by publishing comments, asking questions, and answering questions. However, you must avoid self-promotion. No one will want to engage with you if you spend all your time trying to sell yourself or your business. Instead, apply the 80-20 rule of marketing to your activities, and make sure at least 80% of the time you spend on social media activities is not self-promotional and only 20% is self-promotional.
In time, those audiences will get to know you and develop expectations for your conversations. Eventually, you can lead them back to your own branded online destinations through links to related content. There you can deepen relationships. It’s this type of relationship-building that enables you to develop a band of brand advocates online who will talk about your brand and defend your brand against naysayers. There has never been a more powerful form of word-of-mouth marketing, and you can tap into it thanks to the social Web!
5. Publish Shareworthy Content
Believe it or not, everyone can benefit from social media because of a phenomenon I call the compounding effect of social media participation.
Here is how it works:
How do people find information about businesses in the 21st century? Do they pick up the printed Yellow Pages directory? No. They log into their computers or pick up their smartphones and visit Google where they type in keywords related to the business or professionals they want to find. You need to be represented when people search for keywords related to you and your business!
Here is how the compounding effect of social media participation can help you do it:
Imagine that you have a website for yourself or your business with 10 pages. That’s 10 entry points for Google to find your site through keyword searches. Now, imagine that you add a blog to your website and write a new blog post every day for a year. That’s 365 more entry points for Google to find your site. Next, imagine that your blog posts are incredibly useful and meaningful to your target audience. Your amazing content, which I refer to as shareworthy content, is good enough that your audience shares it with their own online connections. They might share links to your content via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, social bookmarking sites, and even in their own blog posts. Each of those links back to your blog creates additional entry points to your website.
Google ranks search engine results with a lot of incoming links (particularly from authoritative sites) higher than results with few incoming links under the assumption that no one would link to a page if the content on it was terrible. More incoming links to your website increases the likelihood that it might appear on one of the first few pages for Google keyword searches related to your business thereby driving more traffic to your site. You’ve gone from 10 entry points to your website to hundreds or thousands and increased your search engine results rankings all because you published amazing, shareworthy content.
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Trying to get more traffic on your blog and website?
http://michelleshaeffer.com/how-to-steal-blog-traffic-like-a-pirate/2011/10/29/
How to steal traffic like a pirate!
Are you in the “just getting started” phase of blogging where your cat and your goldfish are your only readers?
Don’t despair!
If you don’t have traffic of your own yet, the best way to get some is to take the “Pirate” approach and steal it!
But in a nice way…
Here are some simple ways to get traffic from other people’s networks:
Be Loud & Rowdy (Comment on Other Blogs)
When you comment on a blog it adds a link from your comment to your website (if you put your URL in the URL field). So get out there and be chatty!
Tip: Look for blogs that have CommentLuv enabled. You’ll get not just one link but two—one to your website and another one to your most recent blog post. Here’s a great list of CommentLuv enabled blogs:http://www.trafficgenerationcafe.com/commentluv-enabled/
Jump on the Table and Sing/Dance (Be a Guest Blogger)
Blogging as a guest on other people’s blogs is a great way to get in front of their readers and bring some of them back to your blog. It also helps establish credibility for you.
Tip: When searching for sites to guest blog at, look for ones that have readers who would be interested in your blog. If you blog about social media, try SocialMediaToday.com. If you blog about SEO, try the list atSearch Engine Journal. Get the idea? Search at AllTop or Technorati to find blogs in your niche.
Sign In & Be on the “List” (Get Listed at Blogging Directories)
Speaking of AllTop and Technorati, are you listed there yet? Get listed and borrow their traffic!
There are lots of directories and search engines you can get your blog listed in. Look for directories that are based on niche, too.
Rub Shoulders with the Great Ones (Share Resources & Bloggers)
By featuring other bloggers in a post on your website, you get their attention and if it’s nice, they’re likely to tweet/share your post. You could write about them, link to a helpful post they’ve written, or even interview them for a post.
Let Others Do the Work (Feature Guest Bloggers)
Invite other bloggers to write for your blog. Guest bloggers usually bring their traffic and fans with them because they’ll promote the post when it goes live on your site.
Oh, and don’t really let others do the work. When you get a guest blogger, do what you can to drive traffic to that post, too!
Round Up Your Crew (Create a Tribe)
If you’re on Twitter, join http://triberr.com/ and create a tribe of pirate mateys. You’ll be setup to automatically Tweet out their new posts, and they’ll tweet out yours, helping all of you reach a great audience by leveraging the networks of everyone in the Tribe.
Or use HootSuite to setup each other’s RSS feeds to share with your networks automatically.
What Else Would a Pirate Do?
What other ways can you think of to build your blog by connecting with others? Get creative!
Pirate Image Credit: http://stockfresh.com/gallery/keeweeboy
Free Ebook – Blogging for business.
Hey folks! I’ve got a free ebook from Hubspot on business blogging available.