Some great ideas to increase visibility and traffic
It was very encouraging to see the Social Media Optimization session at SES Chicago 2006 packed to capacity. And when the speakers did the usual poll of the audience, the change in a year was apparent: social media optimization is catching on in a big way.
Andy Hagens really hit the reality of this audience squarely on the head when he said that he was not posting to social media sites to be a ‘good community member,’ he was doing it for blatant marketing reasons. He wants the traffic. His advice on how to make it to the top on sites like digg? Be a consistent user. You can’t make a dent on a social media site with just one posting.
Rand Fishkin, the guru of link baiting and social media campaigns, pointed out that you still use all the traditional techniques of marketing and PR – figure out who the audience is and give them a piece of content that will resonate.
Rand described the digg audience as bored, young, tech-savvy college kids sitting in their dorm looking for something they consider to be interesting content. If that’s your target audience, go for digg.
If you have a product in the health care industry and your audience is baby boomers, digg won’t help you much.
For non tech stories, getting posted to reddit or newsvine is a much better bet.
Just like any other media, social media sites need to be understood. No silver bullet here – you have to do your homework.
Social media is a lot of work and it has to be repeated often. Coming up with the content is the tricky part. But what makes news is still same old, same old:
Sensationalism, Big Names, Money, Scandal, New and Unique, Humor.
Some things in the PR business never change – you just find new ways to reach your audience.
