I get asked a lot about social media and what that means. Very often I find myself in the predicament of trying to explain something that a person has no frame of reference for. Social media is still a new phenomena and using it to market goods and services is a pretty new concept.
To clarify how to use social media in your marketing mix, I’ve scoured the web and come up with a list of places where you can submit your articles to generate both links coming into your site to help with search engine optimization and (keep your fingers crossed) traffic!
Digg is the biggest. Make no mistake about it. And here’s what’s cool. If you can generate 60 Diggs within the first 24 hours, your article is pretty much guaranteed to hit the Digg homepage.
Why is this a good thing?
Because Digg will reward your efforts by sending you a pretty big surge of traffic, often 5,000 to 10,000 people within the first few hours if your article makes it to the homepage. While nice when it happens, it’s good to remember that the traffic surge will very likely be short-lived. But your content will be very accessible and if it’s picked up that content you created could potentially bring 100s of links back to your site.
Having said all that, here are some other social sites that you can potentially use to create links and market yourself and your content.
Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site. Once you sign up with Del.icio.us, you can use their service to tag your articles with relevant keywords. Del.icio.us users often subscribe to RSS feeds of certain “tag” keywords. People who subscribed to the feeds with the same keywords you use see a link to your article in their feed.
Why is this a good thing?
Because, if another user reads your article and they like it, they might tag it themselves. And, if enough people tag your site, it will rise up to the Del.icio.us popular page where it will be seen like Digg by many people, resulting in tons of links and lots of visits.
Reddit is a lot like Digg. However, the user base is much smaller. Users can submit links, vote on them and (again, like Digg) the most popular articles will rise to the top bringing in links and visits to your site.
Why is this a good thing?
Because Reddit is not as big as Digg or Del.icio.us, your chances of getting your content on the move quickly are pretty good.
Furl is basically the same thing as Del.icio.us just with a smaller user base. Furl can be used as an online social bookmarking service and as a way to save archived copies of web pages
The most important reason to use Furl is that, by tagging your pages there, you can get them to show up on the Technorati pages.
Why is this a good thing?
Because Technorati is the fastest growing blog network on the web right now. Pretty much everyone knows about Technorati Tag pages, so showing up there is always an excellent thing.
StumbleUpon is actually a toolbar you can install on your browser. You select topics you are interested in from several categories. Then, click Stumble! on the toolbar, and it will take you to pages that other users (who’ve also installed the toolbar) have rated as “ I like it!.”
Why is this a good thing?
Because, you can go to your own articles and click “I like it!” This will submit your site to the database, where other users can see it. If several of people like your article and give it a positive rating, it will be shown more often. If this happens…you guessed it…more traffic and more links!
There are other social sites like Blinklist, Netscape (believe it or not) Spurl (operating at reduced functionality at the moment due to spam attacks) and Yahoo MyWeb. They are all similar to the above mentioned sites. Each of the listed sites has their own individual set of rules that you should follow when joining and when submitting articles.
The best definition of social media that I’ve heard was from Mike Murphy, cheif revenue officer of Facebook. “Active sharing online.” Simple. To the point.
I like it and it’s absolutely true! Thanks, Toby.