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Using Social Media Marketing to Get More Visitors to Your Site

Editors Note: As a publisher, you know that getting more users to your site is vital if you’re going to earn revenue from contextual advertising. Last time, Louise Rijk introduced the basics of social media marketing (SMM.) Today, she digs more deeply and shows you how to go about developing an effective SMM campaign to help get those users.

SMM Redux
As we discussed briefly last week, “SMM” is marketing that you initiate by uploading or bookmarking and tagging content on social media and networking sites such as Digg, MySpace, Wikipedia, Flickr, del.cio.us and Reddit.

(The photo at right is a great example of how social media, and the network effect, can work. The photo is called “Whisper” and it was snapped my Brian Scott, who uploaded it to his Flickr account, where we found it. Because we posted it on our blog, under Creative Commons license, and linked to it, thousands more people are likely to see Brian’s photos than would have if he had kept them in a closed photo album or on his computer—M2.)

Depending on the type of site, this content can be text, video, audio or even widgets that users put on their own sites that distribute your content, such as the MyBlogLog badge. (More on these options below.)

SMM Benefits
The benefits of a social media marketing campaign include:

• More Links—SMM campaigns can generate incoming links and result in higher rankings in organic search results.
• More Traffic—SMM campaigns can generate more traffic from profile pages, from links embedded in messages that travel virally throughout the social web, and from pages that rank high in search.
• More Brand Awareness—An SMM campaign can build more brand-awareness through visibility, online reputation and authority in the social media.
• Better “Legs”— If your message gets enough attention in the social media sphere, there’s a chance it will be picked up by other, more traditional media, such as mainstream news sites, newspapers, magazines and television. Think Perez Hilton or lonelygirl15. (Remember JenniCam?)

SMM Strategies
Most marketing strategies involve reaching the potential visitor at a distance, through advertising, email and other messaging. In SMM, you engage directly with your potential audience through existing social media, encouraging them to generate discussion about your content, your products or your services. SMM techniques include:

• Submitting a how-to article or tip sheet to a “voting” site like Digg and Reddit
• Bookmarking an article on sites like del.icio.us or ma.gnolia
• Uploading and tagging images up on Flickr, Photobucket, etc.
• Uploading videos to Yahoo! Video, iFilm, YouTube, etc.
• Establishing a business profile at a social media web site like MySpace or Facebook
• Developing your own widget that lets users spread your content on their own sites

The Social Medium is Not the Message
Way back in 1964, the pop philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously said, “the medium is the message.” What he meant that the form of the media carrying the message is more important than the content that the message conveys.

Well, it probably sounded good at the time. The fact remains, however, that content is king. You can have the best gee-whiz media technology at your fingertips—which we pretty much do these days—but if your content is crap, people will use those fingertips to click away.

A Surfeit of Options
There are currently more than 300 social media sites, and the number is growing all the time. Each has a specific focus and community culture—its own “social glue.” The best social media sites for an SMM campaign are those that are supported by large public communities. Here is selection of some of the most prominent ones:

Planning an SMM Campaign
A successful SMM campaign is not something that just anyone can pull off. It’s highly dependent on the originality—or sometimes outrageousness—of the message, but also on careful goal-setting and audience-targeting. Here are some guidelines that you can use to put your campaign on the right track:

Set Goals and Objectives—Set your campaign goals and objectives before you execute the campaign, so that you can track and measure the campaign’s performance. What is the goal? What are the key performance indicators? What makes the campaign a success?

Target Your Audience—First, research the social media sites that you plan to target for your campaign. That way, you get an understanding of what kind of content is popular on those sites. Knowing your audience, and how to reach them via social media, is one of the most important aspects of social media marketing. This way, you avoid submitting an article about quilting on Digg where the audience tends to be more interested in technology. You’ll find that sites like MySpace are more appropriate for a subject like quilting, since they have groups on many general topics. Social networking sites are notorious for generating lots of untargeted traffic with low conversion rates, so make sure you target only the most relevant ones.

Lastly, make sure your content is also on target. Knowing your audience and how to reach them via social media is one of the most important aspects of social media marketing. To be successful, an SMM campaign should more be about your brand, content, products or services—and how your audience interacts with them—than just about something cool or outré for its own sake.

Build Trust—Building trust with your target communities is also vital. Messages almost always travel better and faster through the social web when generated by people who have built a reputation as trusted experts. Yahoo! Answers is a good place to start, answering users’ questions and gaining a reputation as an expert in your field.

Help Users Help You—There are simple things you can do to facilitate the viral distribution of content through the social web, such as adding links or icons within the content to encourage bookmarking on sites like Slashdot or del.icio.us, or content voting at Digg or Stumbleupon.

Be Bold—As noted above, content is still king. SMM is less about technology and more about ideas. The better and bolder your idea, the more reach and visibility you’re likely to get. Don’t shrink from controversy, but stay on target to your brand and your audience’s needs. And try not to get yourself sued!

Don’t Spam—The thing people like about social media is that it’s content created by users, for users. They don’t want to feel as if they’re being given the hard sell. If they do, they will likely reject your message. Some unscrupulous marketers will tag and/or vote for their own content over and over in hopes that it will bubble up to the home page of sites like Digg. That may work once or twice, but in the end it’s likely to get you blackballed. Instead, you should plant your message and let users take it from there.

Next time we’ll discuss some of the tips and tricks to optimize your social media campaign—social media optimization, or SMO.

—Louise Rijk, co-founder and vice-president of marketing and sales, Advanced Media Productions

Photo by Brian Scott, courtesy Flickr