Social Media

Using Social Media – Avoid Common Mistakes

Web 2.0 marketing, or also related and common used term social media marketing, can be determined as approaches and methodologies used to increase traffic through web 2.0 communities and related communication websites.

Where your prospects and costumers hang out online? Network, bookmarking and video sharing communities, blogs and forums…to reach them consider using web 2.0 marketing tools, but before that take a look at following social media assessment.

First, when we talk about marketing at web 2.0 communities, it’s important to know that social community websites dislike aggressive marketers, because they aggressively use these sites for promoting their own products instead of contributing to network. There is a right and wrong way for web 2.0 business promotion, where many people do not see difference between Social Media Advertising and Social Media Marketing, where the second respond more to networking and making connections.

Social sites have their own rules of communication and members who police the sites for spam submission. Marketers who don’t understand how to interact with these sites, how to behave and how to follow the rules, will have trouble there. Opposite to community contribution almost on each of these sites you can buy advertising space, but if we talk about social media marketing and networking then consider following networking behavior guide.

And by the way, it’s not only about marketing and traffic. Using web 2.0 communities is great for building and maintaining relationship with existing costumers and audience. For example, my favorite radio show is using Facebook in this purpose. Do you think it’s necessary to have radio show to use Facebook in this purpose?

While it can be useful to have thousands friends, you have to be aware that what matter is a  connection’s quality and a quality of the conversation. If you’re just adding people as friends and spam them around you’re  on the wrong way. It’s just the matter of time when they will stop reading whatever you send or delete you as the friend. Obviously, if you are not part of the conversation, you are a part of trouble! Evidently you cannot join the conversation on every social community, because there is so much of them. Just look at lists:

• Top 50 Social bookmarking websites
• Top 30 Social News websites
• Top 30 video sharing communities.

There are also many social networking websites like well known MySpace and Facebook, but as well specialized and niche oriented. Find the sites that are related to your niche and as well join conversation at few leading primary network communities. Since you cannot be active on every website, further concentrate on link building.

Certainly, social media is time consuming, but if you see your business as short term, then social media marketing is not for you. In that case you may consider social media advertising (mentioned above). Anyway “Rome wasn’t built in a day”. Additionally consider hiring web 2.0 community manager for your business. Dependent on your firm size, you can do it personally, bring a new employee or engage someone of existing coworkers to update information about company, products, make new promotions…

Link Building

The best way to boost your search engine optimization is by link building, i.e. by pointing many backlinks to your website, or even better by building many targeted backlinks to the website (links from sites related to your niche). You can only buzz a piece of content for your site once. Once it is submitted to social sites, you are done. . . but what can you do more to buzz up your content?

You submit, not only your pages, instead you submit your “satellite sites” and other websites that are talking about you and linking to you! This way you boost them, but as well your pages. Now, you think how important is to build web of contacts and turning some of them in blog partners.

Social Media Marketing Tools

I have assembled few useful social media marketing tools, which can help you in your video sharing, bookmarking, RSS submission, etc. Using them will help you in backlinks link building.