The Web is a bit different than it was 10 years ago. Finding places where your target market was spending time back then was a matter of finding the one or two forums that were active, if there were any at all, in a niche.
Today groups of of people are lined up on the web, neatly and categorically, and can number in the hundreds around a single topic across myriad social networks. One need only Google their top keywords to find an endless supply of places to hang out to generate interest and links to their site.
Belly Up
Social media offers site marketers an All-You-Can-Eat buffet of links and tools to interact with like-minded people in every niche you can think of.
So why do I get emails from newer site owners who are just as perplexed about generating publicity and search engine rankings as we were 10 years ago? If everything is easier today than it was then to generate near instant traffic and notoriety, why do people still fail to deliver the traffic they need?
A lack of perspective doesn’t help. Who cares how much harder marketing online was 5-10 years ago? We’re in the “now” man!
The other problem is the same as the solution. There are tons of places today to get traffic. Now marketers can become frozen in place wondering which sources they are going to focus on to deliver that traffic among the thousands available.
Horse Sense
There are over 400,000 search results in Google for “horse lovers community,” for example. Not all of those results are social media sites. Some are old fashioned forums which might also be traffic producers for a horse related ecommerce site or blog. Others include a surprisingly high number of horse lovers’ dating sites. I guess horse lovers want to find love within the herd as much as anyone else does.
The point is, there are a lot of places to check out, and with a lot of the market research is already done for you. Markets are lined up in well-defined, easy-to-find groups on the web these days. You know right from the start where the major groups of people in any market niche like to hang out just by Googling keywords.
Too Many Choices?
After Facebook, Digg, Mixx, BlogCatalog, MyBlogLog, Propeller, and the various niche-specific social communities that exist around a single topic, a marketer has a lot of choices to make about where to spend precious time meeting, greeting, linking, and advertising.
This is where the Type A personality gets bogged down. Type B’s don’t do much better. In the face of so many choices, many marketers freeze up and wonder if social marketing is going to be worth the time to get organized and effectively go after the traffic available to them.
Questions many people are asking me about social media marketing include:
1. How do I know spending time in these communities and on Web 2.0 sites is going to pay off?
2. Which sites to I focus on most?
3. Which TYPES of social media sites will produce the most traffic and interest?
4. Is “social traffic” as responsive as search engine or paid traffic?
Most Common Comments:
1. There are too many choices.
2. I don’t seem to be getting anything other than sporadic socializing done.
3. It doesn’t feel like a “business” and it is hard to measure the effectiveness of the time I am spending.
Taking the Zen Approach to Social Marketing
Following is my advice for the overwhelmed and “not-so-sure” marketers.
1. Break off a dedicated amount of time each day to focus on the sites you’ve isolated as the “core” social sites to interact with. These will include the biggest sites with the most concentrated group of prospective customers. You should only have around 5 sites to deal with, so choose among all the sites you find your target market hanging out on wisely.
2. Set aside another block of time weekly to research new places to set up accounts and test them for interest. Interest is measured by the amount of traffic you can pull out of these sites with the least amount of interaction. For example, how many visitors can you generate from a site by blogging there once a week? Or once a month?
3. Over time you will build a pretty sizable network of places you feel you need to visit often. This is where people usually break down. And this is where the Zen approach comes in handy.
For sites that are moderate to “unknown” traffic producers, just let them be. Give them what time you can and stay focused on your main traffic earners with a concerted effort.
Let email notifications from sites you interact with only occasionally be your reminder to step back into them and do a little blogging, posting, voting, friending, or commenting. Otherwise, keep them off your “must do” list.
4. Pay attention to your stats and only spend time on sites that are producing traffic for you. You will find some of your top 5 sites will change over time as you find new sites that offer more potential. That’s okay, but you must keep your top 5 list at 5 sites. Many people’s top 5 list expands to 10 or 20 and, again, this leads to burn out and frustration as they try to keep up a demanding schedule of social marketing.
This inevitably leads to something else suffering in your marketing plan. And it will cause many to question whether the whole social marketing thing is worth it at all.
Be like water and flow through social sites. Let the activities each sites “wants” you to participate in flow around you and don’t freak out thinking you must interact with every site you are a part of just because you can. Many times are not the right times to drop what you are doing to go answer friend requests.
Do it when you can do it. The people and the sites are not going anywhere.
Social Marketing Really Works
With a perspective gained from over a decade marketing online, I sometimes get frustrated by how “spoiled” we are today as online marketers. I would have killed for all the choices we enjoy today for pulling traffic to our sites outside of the search engines back when they were among the few choices we had for getting traffic.
When sitting at an all-you-can-eat buffet of traffic, just like a real buffet, you will get full fast. And you will lament the fact that you wanted to eat so much more before you got full.
Realize that you have tomorrow, next week, and next month to sample from this social media buffet. It is the largest buffet ever created and you’ll never get much out of it if you try to eat it all at once.
Get into the flow of social media marketing. Swim in the opportunities that exist to bring your site targeted, willing readers and customers. Don’t try to master it in a month. Put it to work for you in the time you have allotted each day, week, and month.
Gradually you will feel at peace in your part of the vast ocean of places to grab traffic and links and you will become comfortable in the knowledge that it will always be there to supply you with what you need, when you need it.
Social Marketing Resources
- Authority Black Book:Â Jack Humphrey’s free guide to social media marketing.
- Social Marketing Central: A free community to learn what other marketers are doing with social media marketing, ask questions, and find new places to check out.
- Social Power Linking: The most inexpensive way to learn absolutely everything there is to know about ranking well in the engines and getting a lot of traffic with social media marketing.
Software
- Web2Submitter: Submit content to the top social news and bookmarking directories easily. Reduce the amount of time you spend on promotion.
- Video Utility Poster: Makes video blogging (vlogging) super easy, putting the entire internet’s video content at your disposal for great, relevant, sticky content.
- TrackBoost: Software to drastically increase your links, traffic and rankings.