press@subhub.com.
Best regards
Miles Galliford
http://www.subhub.com
Using Social Media Marketing to Promote Your Specialist Information Website
Before I get started, it is worth defining social media. It
has become a widely used and abused term that means
different things to different people.
My definition of social media is:
'online technologies and practises that people use to share
their opinions, insights and experiences with each other.
Information can be shared as text, images, audio or video
via blogs, message boards, wikis, RSS, podcasts and social
networking sites'.
At the heart of social media is the ability of individuals
to interact with other people so that they feel involved
and part of a community. A big part of this phenomenon is
the activity of finding, sharing and recommending products,
services, events and experiences to like-minded people.
This is where social media crosses over with marketing.
Social media can be a great way to have your website
promoted by word-of-mouth.
If you can get people to talk about and recommend your
services to their peers, it is more powerful than any
marketing you can buy. So how can you get started?
How Can You Make Social Media Work for You?
The good news is it is easy to start the process of using
social media to promote your website.
1) Create a MySpace Page
MySpace (www.myspace.com) is the largest and best-known
social network. Individuals create profiles about
themselves and then invite similarly minded people to
become their online friends. When someone becomes a friend,
you can communicate with them and subtly direct them
towards your own website.
Setting up your own page is simple and free. Go to
www.myspace.com and follow the instructions. Put up a brief
description about yourself and a link to a more detailed
biography page on your own website. Remember, the goal of
this page is to drive people to your own site so make sure
you get plenty of links included without overtly promoting
your website.
Spend an hour every week developing your site and building
your list of friends. Invite relevant people to comment
about your website.
2) Add Bookmarking Links to Your Article Pages
A big part of the social web is the ability for people to
build lists of their favourite sites or articles. People
with similar interests can then share their lists and
benefit from other people's recommendations. If your
website has free content, you should make these articles
easy to bookmark or add to favourites lists. There are a
lot of internet sites that now host and share bookmarks.
You can add links to these sites to your article pages.
There are two ways of doing this. You can go to each of the
leading bookmarking sites and download their code and links
onto your site. The ones that you should include are:
? Digg - www.digg.com
? Technorati ? www.technorati.com
? Del.icio.us ? www.del.icio.us
? Reddit ? www.reddit.com
However, if you go this route it can be time consuming and
you will omit many of the potential bookmarking sites. The
alternative is to put a link to AddThis.com
(www.addthis.com) on the foot of each page. This gives your
users access to over 30 bookmarking sites.
3) Add an RSS Feed
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site
Syndication, depending on who you ask. RSS allows people to
be notified every time new articles are added to your
website so they can keep up to date with your content.
Ask your developer to create some RSS code for your website
and then put a link on all of your pages to the RSS code
page. The link should be a small orange rectangle with the
letters RSS in white.
Publish your RSS feeds at Feedburner (www.feedburner.com)
to encourage distribution and interest.
4) Email to a Friend
Enabling people to easily email an article to a friend is
not typically bundled under the heading of social media
marketing, but in my view it is another way to encourage
people to share and recommend your content. Add an ?Email a
Friend' link to all of your content pages.
5) Add a Forum
Having a Forum on your website is a great way of building a
community around your subject area. Monitoring the forum
will both give you a chance to understand what people are
discussing and promote your expertise by adding your own
comments.
The downside of a forum is it does need to be carefully
managed. You need to allow people to make negative comments
so they don't feel they are being censored, but you have to
stamp out aggressive behaviour, personal insults, spam and
meaningless rubbish. This can be time-consuming work, so
don't bother with a forum unless you have the time to do it
properly.
Non-technical people can pay to use vBulletin
(www.vbulletin.com). More technical people can use a free
opensource solution such as PHPBB (www.phpbb.com).
You can register your forum with BoardTracker
(www.boardtracker.com) to make it easier for people to find.
6) Create How-To or Product Review Videos
It has never been easier to create short videos that can
demonstrate your expertise. How-to videos are very popular.
For example, if your website is about Making Money on eBay,
you could create a short video on "How to Take Perfect
Photos for Your eBay Listings". Make sure you have your
website URL on the opening and closing sequence of your
video to promote your website.
Post your videos on YouTube (www.youtube.com) and Google
Videos (http://video.google.com/). Give it a catchy title
and teaser to get people interested. Also link to the
videos from your own website.
7) Share Your Photos
If you have photos related to your subject area, post them
on photo sharing websites such as Flikr (www.flikr.com) and
PhotoBucket (www.photobucket.com). For example, if your
website is about steam trains, take a camera to your next
steam train show and post the pictures on these sites.
People searching for steam train images are likely to try
these sites. They can then follow the link on the photo to
your website. P.S. Remember to include links back to your
own site from the images.
8) Create a Blog
Blogs are very simple content sites where short articles
are listed one after the other on the home page. They are
usually used to write about current events or comment on
news.
Some successful content websites are blogs. Some are much
more like magazines with feature articles. If your site is
more feature-based, consider starting a separate blog that
can be more informal and brief. Update the blog every day
even if it is with just one- or two-sentence comments.
Blogs that are infrequently updated quickly lose their
audience.
Use the blog to drive traffic to your main website.
You can get basic blogging software for free. Try Wordpress
(www.wordpress.com) or Blogger (www.blogger.com). For a
managed service, try Typepad (www.typepad.com).
**********
In many ways, today's social media technologies are still
fairly primitive, but I can say with confidence that the
phenomenon that they have created ? of customers taking
control of the buying process ? is here to stay. Customers
will continue to get stronger, so publishers, manufacturers
and anyone else with customers better start listening to
what they are saying.
One last point before I finish. It's really a word of
warning. Once you adopt the social media marketing
techniques, you are inviting people to comment about your
service. You must be ready for negative as well as positive
feedback. Good companies listen to the feedback and make
positive changes. Poor companies ignore it or worse still,
call their lawyers to fight it.
If you jump into the social media world, be ready to
participate, listen, learn and take action.
----------------------------------------------------
SubHub provides an all-in-one solution to enable you to
rapidly design, build and run your own content website.
Publish for profit on the web.
Website: http://www.subhub.com
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