Allow me to introduce my friend Jordan Kasteler also known
as Utah SEO Pro. His background is in organic search engine
optimization, which has been doing professionally for 4
years now, and has stayed pretty focused on that and has't
delved much into paid search at all. But as of late, he
told me he has been playing a lot lately in social media
and there are quite a few things he has learned. He also
told me that there were quite a few things historically
done he wishes he could erase. He doesn't want to look
like an idiot, especially to the SMOs, but what he wants to
do is save a few headaches for people getting into social
media. Today I am going to take what Jordan has taught me
and I'm going to focus primarily on Digg because, it seems
to be the most complex social media site out there due to
its sophisticated algorithm. I am going to write his exact
words, of course with his permission. So everything below
will be straight from Jordan, which is some great insights
on Social Marketing.
Mistake #1: Abusing self-promotion
For the past year and a half to two years I've had social
media accounts but I never used them. If I did ever use
them it was just to submit some of my own blog posts or my
company's blog posts too.
Let me note that self-promotion isn't bad all the time. If
you've established an authoritative status in a community
or are a power-user then you are more likely to get away
with it if you do so sparingly. Nobody likes a
self-promoter or person who is greedy. It is essential to
contribute to other people and help them promote their
stories. Karma comes full-circle when it comes to social
networking.
Mistake #2: Not understanding the scope of the site or the
community in its entirety
I've heard a lot of social media experts suggesting to take
a look at the site and community before you register to
understand what it's about. That advice is half the battle
but before you can really understand what it's about you
have to observe, participate, and test significantly. My
mistake was not knowing that the one community perceives
things differently than other communities.
For example, Digg.com hates SEOs. I learned this by my low
response on SEO articles submitted. Good thing I was
currently operating under the name "jordankasteler" instead
of "UtahSEOpro". This could have been bad had I started
participating with the name "UtahSEOpro" and then realized,
after much wasted time and effort, that none of my stuff
will ever get promoted because nobody likes me.
Another example happened lately on Mixx.com. I submitted
one of my own articles to a group on Mixx that had a rule
strictly against self-promotion. Needless to say that
didn't go over well.
Moral of the story here is know the community, know the
rules, know that goes hot and what doesn't, know who's hot
and who's not and imitate them.
Another tip is to seek out niche communities that aren't as
big as say Reddit, Digg, Delicious, or StumbleUpon. There
are niche sites like sphinn.com for Internet marketers,
Sk-rt.com for woman, and Hugg.com for nature lovers.
Relevant content in niche communities can drive more
traffic and links than broader communities sometimes.
Mistake #3: Not having goals When I very first started
using Digg used it almost as a bookmarking service. At the
time, I probably didn't even know the difference between
Digg and Delicious. When I found a site I liked, I
submitted it to Digg not considering or caring if the
community would like it or not or if it was news worthy.
What a horrible waste, I now have 70+ submissions and only
a small percentage of them are actual quality content that
I've submitted with intentions of promoting news worthy or
remarkable article, video, or image.
Start by creating goals for every piece you submit. Your
goals should be to promote everything you submit and do so
with pride. If you submit low-quality content then you're a
low-quality contributor and the community will recognize it
quickly. Don't just submit and forget. Use a tool like Digg
Alerter to watch your submitted content. If someone
comments on a post then respond back to them whether the
comment was positive or negative. The key here is to engage
with the community and try to start a conversation.
Comments are a good quality indicator of a post so this is
an important part detail. If you don't have a good response
for the comment at least vote it up or down depending on
the quality of the comment.
Mistake #4: Choosing quantity over quality when it comes to
friends
Initial thinking of a newbie would be the more friends the
better, right? WRONG! I'm not sure if this is recent with
Digg's new algorithm change or what but what I've found out
is that the more friend you have the higher the threshold
is for a story to go popular. My mistake was adding too
many friends and not monitoring if they were voting for my
content or not. After decreasing my friend count on Digg
from nearly 500 friends to about 65 friends I've seen the
threshold drop dramatically. For most social media sites
you want to keep your friends very relevant to your
interests and make sure that they are active users. Having
non-active users, people who don't appreciate your
submissions, and people who don't help you promote your
submitted content is useless. I'll go back to Karma here,
if you're not being active and helping others yourself then
don't expect your friends to do the same.
A wise thing is to constantly monitor your friend activity
and trim down friends who aren't beneficial to your success
or not. This isn't to hurt anyone's feelings but if they
aren't going to play they need to get off the field.
Mistake #5: Not using RSS
I hate RSS when it comes to reading my news so I've stayed
clear from it but I discovered that RSS is my best friend
for social media. There are a couple reasons why. The first
reason is if you're contributing a lot of content,
especially news worthy items, then timing is everything.
It's wise to subscribe to news sites like CNN.com or
NYTimes.com so you can catch hot stories as soon as they
are posted.
The second reason is that you can subscribe to what your
friends are posting so you can help them promote their
content without having to go to each profile and check up
on them daily. It's a huge timesaver and an easy way to
keep tabs on your friend's activity.
*BONUS Mistake* Not considering submission timing
There are certain times in each community where there are
more eyes on the site or certain categories than others.
Knowing those times and submitting during them is
important. Generally, most people surf social sites in the
morning or around lunch time during their break at work.
It's a good time to submit around then to capture people's
attention. It can make the different of whether your story
goes popular or not.
If you're up at 3:00 a.m. and you see a hot story pop up on
your RSS reader from CNN then it's probably not wise to
save that until lunch-time the next day to submit because
then you run the risk of someone else submitting it first.
So be wise and use common sense.
Summary
Hopefully learning from my mistakes will help you avoid
them in the future. I like to teach people the correct way
of doing things based on my experience and hopefully you
can take what you've learned and do the same.
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More can be learned at http://www.LearnSEOLive.com .
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