Social Media Marketing Do's and Don'ts

Social Media Marketing Do's and Don'ts

By Eric Enge
May 9, 2007

On Thursday of SES NY, I had the chance to sit in on the Social Media Optimization panel. I love these kinds of panels, because there is so much creativity in the speakers. And this panel was no exception. The speakers were:

* Rohit Bhargava, moderator, Ogilvy PR
* Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
* Neil Patel, Advantage Consulting Services
* Andy Hagans, Andy Hagans Link Building

While search engine optimization (SEO) is often perceived as the equivalent of spam by many users on social media sites, those same sites can benefit from them. Besides that, SEOs are often among the early adopters of most social media sites, and they can help them reach critical mass and grow, according to Fishkin.

To get along well with those groups, it's important for an SEO to not act like an SEO, he said. Patel elaborated on this with a list of things not to do on social media sites:

1. Don't Self promote. Get a fried to submit a story for you, if it's on your own site.
2. Don't add biased information
3. Don't buy Votes. It may work once or twice, but it will come back to haunt you eventually. Remember, your reputation is all you have in these communities.
4. Don't break community rules.
5. Don't spam the sites with irrelevant content

Instead, Patel suggested several things that an SEO should do to participate in social media:

1. Actively use the "friend" mechanism, and friend everyone in sight. If they don't friend you back, dump them, and then try someone else. Be careful how you do this though, so you don't get a bad reputation in the community.
2. Participate in the community. Build a reputation as a contributor
3. Write great titles and descriptions. Life and death, this one. Most Diggs occur based on the title and description alone, and many people don't actually look at the article at all. Patel provided an anecdote about a post that he has that made the front page of Digg, at a time when his server was down for reasons other than the "Digg Effect," and the article was not even available to read.
4. Link out generously (some of these people will link back, and get yet other people to link to you too.
5. Become a top user. It takes a bit of effort, but there is a big payoff.
6. Submit you articles at the right time. Patel usually shoots for mid-day on weekdays.

The benefits of marketing with social media are numerous. First off, there's the traffic, but that's not even a primary benefit. In a linkbaiting case study for Network Security Journal, a tech-heavy publication, Hagans noted that his efforts to get links on social networking sites like Digg drove more than 40,000 visitors to the publication's site. However, most of that traffic was useless, as the users were not in the right demographic group that would click on the site's ads, or subscribe to the publication.

The real benefit of the effort was the 3244 back links the client's site added, including several trusted links from authority sites like OReilly.com, LifeHacker.com, and LinixSecurity.com.

Hagans starts a linkbait campaign by focusing on the title and description. As Patel said, those elements can make or break a campaign, since that may be all that many users ever look at. Hagans suggests looking at the "original linkbaiters" for headline inspiration: women's magazines like Cosmo that try to draw readers in with short, interesting titles on the cover. In this case, Hagans used "The fight against phishing: 44 ways to protect yourself."

After the headline and description are done, the next step is to write the article, making sure to fulfill any promises made in the title or description. It also needs to be focused, he said, and it needs to look "pretty," meaning well formatted, easy to read, and professional-looking. It's also helpful to link out generously within the article, so that the referenced bloggers will have a vested interest in driving more traffic to your article, he said.

The top five sites Hagans uses are Digg, Netscape, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Del.icio.us. If he wants to add more sites, he'll consider Yahoo MyWeb and Furl. Besides the social media sites, Hagans suggests sending an e-mail to top blogs in the industry you're in, letting them know you've posted some content they may be interested in.

The additional exposure on those sites can bring in more readers who frequent social media sites, who may then vote for the article on those sites. In addition, many of the visitors will be journalists or bloggers, who may also write about the article and link to it from their own sites.

The return on these efforts can be hard to measure, but there are some tangible benefits that can be pointed to. For instance, the increased traffic from these efforts could be compared to a comparable level of traffic from paid search, SEO, or even e-mail marketing, and compared to the costs of those efforts. For a more formal test, Bhargava suggests setting up separate landing pages for a paid search and social media/linkbait effort and comparing the results.

Fishkin also pointed out that there are less tangible benefits around establishing yourself or your site as an authority on a topic. He once wrote a post about "21 Tactics for Blogging," which was highly ranked on Digg. The exposure from that article led to a speaking engagement on blogging at Stanford University, which in turn led to a magazine article. For the effort it took to create and market that article, the ROI was through the roof, he said.