Social Media Strategies

There are so many Social Media tools out there, coming up with a profile and reputation building strategy is a good way to approach it. Why not just dabble a bit in everything?

Dabbling in a bit of this and a bit of that ‘can’ be good but if you spend time and effort really building a profile and developing a friends list on at least a few, you might find more profitable results with those few than dabbling with a dozen sites.

For example, a lot of successful internet marketing gurus spend time focusing 75% of their social marketing efforts on a few proven sites and the other 25% on ‘other’ sites.

Many Social Media sites have authority rankings attached to user profiles and these increase by participation. By building your profile and building activity on those sites, you could get noticed and get more results because others on those sites will take notice and find more credibility because of your level of participation on the site. Examples:

Twitter

If you’ve got plenty of followers and do some interactive participation, you have more chance of the tweets you publish actually being read. Don’t be a drive-by Twitter-er. Spend time building a relationship with your Twitter followers and they’ll take more notice of your updates than if you use an aggregator tool alone that submits to several micro-blogs without your intervention.

Tools that auto-update can be helpful for time management but if you use them alone without participation, this is transparent and a lot of other site users will likely begin to ignore you. Keep the ‘social’ in social marketing.

Forums

If you’re known as a forum regular on busy community sites, your posts and your signature will get you noticed. Taking a few minutes a day to stop in and be helpful, witty, charming…etc can pay off.

People on that forum who see you’re an established member of the forum who posts regularly and has clout in the community make your posts and your signature more noticeable. You might even choose to be a forum moderator on a volunteer basis on a busy forum in your niche.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon can enable you to have ‘friends’ who can follow you as well as give you results in the search engines. By developing a rapport with people you can get better results. Do this by building your friends list and paying attention when ‘friends’ post, re-post for them, make comments or votes on their postings, etcetera. You’ll find that this strategy can help with your postings because they will get more traction than if you are a “sometimes” user who may or may not get noticed when you do participate on the site.

Your Social Media strategy can take time to build but as you work to build friends lists, user points, or user posts, this tells the community that you’re someone that has some credibility on the site and they may be more willing to click your link, vote up your article, or re-post something you’ve posted.

If you choose a few top sites to spend your energy on, you can quickly see whether your efforts are paying off or not. Check your website analytics to see if any traffic is coming from those sites and check the search engines to see if your profile page or username comes up on the search engines.

Investing time and energy into a few sites that get a lot of traffic could definitely prove worthwhile for you but not all social sites are created equally so it may take a bit of time and effort to find a site worth investing in.

You don’t have to spend inordinate amounts of time on Web 2.0 sites to build credibility, either. Your strategy of visiting a few sites a few times a week could help you develop a following fairly quickly. Social media works best for internet marketers who take the time to understand the social aspect of Web 2.0.

People want to collaborate and if they see you as an authority and helpful netizen, they’re more likely to want to learn more about you and what it is that you sell.