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Social Media Marketing is often talked about in terms of traffic generation.
Of course this is an obvious and huge benefit, especially when you consider how fast you can attract this flood of traffic, and how much ten, or twenty thousand visits would cost even using lower cost Google Adwords.
But Social Media is not just about traffic. There are other strong benefits also.
The important questions are
- What are your goals?
- What are your constraints?
- How will social media help you?
- Are there risks in using this approach?
Your goals need to be well defined, otherwise how will you know if you have achieved them or not. They also need to be realistic, one social media campaign will not put you at the top of the Technorati or Alexa leaderboard.
Traffic is often put forward as a big constraint, but it is not always the true constraint to a business website. If your main constraint is sales, then social media will not help instantly but through knock on effects of brand awareness and boosting your search rankings.
Clients mainly come to me for Social Media Marketing and Linkbait campaigns for the following reasons:
- Raw traffic, as mentioned earlier. It’s an important benefit, but not the only one.
- Deep links, to provide a search engine boost, or to clean up their link profile
- Brand boost, in order to go from obscurity to public awareness
- Attract subscribers, for a new site launch or for an older site to kick it up a notch
- Direct monetization, raking in the cash via CPM ads
Those are all valuable benefits, but how do you acheive one or more of those aims?
The answer is in prioritization, targeting, content and follow-up strategy. Aiming your content and your promotion at the right group of people and not expecting it to be a one-shot deal to achieve all your aims.
What are the risks?
There are few risks, but the main two are being banned from the social bookmarking sites because of over-submitting the same domain, or by burning up your social media goodwill in your friends or audience.
Both are caused by being over active or too pushy. If you only submit your best, top quality stuff, in the right categories and in the correct ways, you will have no worries.
The best thing to do is to try it and see how positive the results are. I’m not suggesting you do this to keep up with all the Web2.0 hype but to see if your business can benefit from these new techniques.
