Social Media Marketing – Should You Participate Or Lurk?

Are you a social media butterfly or are you living in lurkdom online? Lurking can be both positive and not so positive for you. Let’s explore this a little bit.

Selective Social Media Marketing is probably the best idea, since there is an excessive amount of tools to choose from.

Lurking Can Be Good

Analysing what’s going on online is a good idea. You can watch your competition, analyse trends, and see what people are saying.

You can be a sort of “fly on the wall” on many online social networking sites and this information can work to your advantage. There are a lot of different marketing tools out there and you can’t possibly be actively involved on all of them, so sometimes it makes sense to lurk.

Lurking Can Be Bad

But Social Media Marketing is social so if you’re not participating at all, you’re not going to realise the full benefits of this type of marketing. Joining a lot of different social marketing sites can be good for business.

Reserving your name (or your brand) is important as you never know what might be the next “Twitter” and you want people to be able to find you without having to guess what your username is. But you don’t always have time to actively participate on all of the various social media sites available.

Lurking can be a good thing at times because you can slip in and see what’s happening and slip back out again without investing too much time or energy but if you’re not participating enough, it might be time to get more strategic. If you lurk too much on certain sites, you could be missing out.

Here are some guidelines for you to help you make the most of being selectively social online:

• Don’t just lurk when participation could help you get more customers. Twitter and other microblogging tools are useless without participation.

• Do be sure that if people address you specifically, that you answer them. This is good form on social marketing circles because if you don’t, people might stop following you or block your updates.

• Figure out what’s hot and what’s not so you can decide where to spend your time both actively and passively. Finding out what successful competitors of yours are doing could be a good clue.

• Don’t overdo it! Make sure you’re not just pumping out constant links without participation.

• Watch your numbers. If you see your visitor numbers / followers drop, this is a sign that you might not be participating enough.

• Make sure that your account doesn’t seem like it has been abandoned when the site in question is fairly active. You might abandon useless tools but where a site does have a fair amount of activity and you see that you can benefit from using it, slot some time into your schedule to participate.

• Schedule social marketing / networking into your schedule. Spending a few minutes a day or a half hour a few times a week could give you a lot of “bang for your buck” without being a scheduling disaster.

• Utilise tools that make Social Media Marketing easier. Tools that aggregate services, that ping multiple services simultaneously, or that mine services for useful data are going to help you make the most of the best tools that are out there.

One of the best ways to figure out which sites are worth spending time outside of lurkdom on, is to use them and then check your website statistics to see if you’re getting traffic from them.

Have a most outstanding day.

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketing
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008 - 2012

 

Tagged as: microblogging, social marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, social networking, Twitter, Website Statistics