Social News and Community Sites Dislike Marketers Because We Too Often Cheapen Their Idea of Free-Flowing, Valuable Information That Stands On Its Own
Social sites have their own cliques, rules, and members who police their beloved sites for spam submissions. Marketers who don’t understand how to interact with these sites, how to behave, and how to read the rules before signing up, do people like me and the other members of such sites a disservice. There’s a reason top users of communities and news sites think all marketers are spammers.
Some reasons they think marketers are spammers…
1. Seeding (submitting) posts from your own blog. (Some have zero tolerance like Newsvine, and others expect you to submit a lot more about sites and stories that are not your own rather than just a long list of your own blog posts.
2. Ghost Profiles: The completeness of your profile is an indicator of whether you are or aren’t a spammer. If you sign up for a site like 9Rules.com and immediately begin submitting your own stuff without filling out your profile or making any obvious attempt to be a part of the community other than to promote your site, you will be dealt with harshly. The harshest part: deafening silence and apathy toward your posts leading to eventual or immediate banning of your site from the system.
3. All Take and No Give: You appear to only show up when you have something of your own to contribute. Your recent activity, logged publicly on many of these sites, indicates who you are really interested in: yourself. And there’s nothing the dedicated users of these sites hate more than blatant self-promotion.
4. Your content sucks BIG time: If you take a look around these sites you will see the kind of content that bubbles to the top and gets popular. Is your content anything like that? Then to them, and me, you are a spammer and you make it harder for legitimate users of these sites to passively market through good content and participation because you raise the sensitivity level so high that people like me even get grouped in with the spammers at times.
If You’re Not Part of the Conversation, You’re Part of the Problem!
There’s only one reason a person won’t see significant gains from a social marketing campaign. It’s because they treat it like a marketing campaign in the first place.
My clients and members of Authority Site Center are taught from day 1 to respect the social sites, know the rules, and post only when they have something remarkable to say. No sales pitches masked as content. No ghost profiles. No whoring your own links while failing to spend time interacting, voting, and clipping other content.
This is one of the reasons our members get more traffic and higher rankings from social sites than the average marketer. They are taught not to market under any of the traditional definitions of marketing.
Everyone on a social site is a marketer.
If they don’t have their own sites to promote, they certainly promote themselves by posting often, interacting and commenting, and being a pillar in their niche within the community.
That’s how you do it: promote yourself by being the most prolific and helpful member you can be in each community. Following the rules is proven to attract links and traffic. Spamming is a total waste of time. There aren’t any algorithms to defeat in a human network. Humans have excellent bullshit detectors and cannot be fooled.
The first rule after joining any new web 2.0 community or news site is to create a full profile and then go read what the top members are posting and commenting on. Learn from the people who are respected in each community and you will soon be able to interact properly and pull traffic out of these sites the way they do.