Advanced SMO: How to Build a Social Media Storm
With social media optimisation (SMO), it helps an awful lot if you either know the right people or are active in the places where you are looking to target. Once you do or are it is fairly easy. Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your good content and your SMO campaign, for once you find your feet:
Forget Digg: I know it has been said many times, but it is even more true then ever now. For nine out of ten sites Digg is a big waste of time and getting any kind of e-commerce site on the homepage is virtually impossible. The only people who look in the upcoming section are the digg staff and fellow marketers. Spend 30 seconds getting your free link and then move on.
Planning is Everything: Make a list of all of the social media websites you are going to submit your content to and then work out roughly how long you think it is going to take for your content to go popular on each site. For example with Reddit you can be fairly sure that if your content is going to go popular, it will do within and hour or two. With Mixx it will normally take a good 6 hours and with Stumbleupon you just can’t tell, so you leave that out of the equation.
Once you have done this you need to choose a time for when you are going to plan to have all of your submissions go popular. You might say to yourself, I want all of my submissions to be going popular 7 hours from now at 11.00pm. Then you add the time you need to submit next to each social media site on your list.
Go to work and do everything as planned. If you have submitted to all of the major social sites and if all of the elements are in the equation, then when the time comes you should be able to make it into the top 10 on popurls and you should be getting a load of traffic from JimmyR.com. I have had over 3,000 uniques from popurls.com and I have had over 2,500 uniques from JimmyR.com. If you make it into the top 10 on popurls you have won and you will generally receive over 50,000 unique visitors in a short space of time and lots of trackbacks.
Comment Management: Once you have started to go popular on some of the social media sites you can make your content go a lot further by dealing with negative comments. There are lots of different ways to do this and trying to talk to the negative commenter(s) isn’t always the best one, here are a few ideas:
- Have all of your friends down vote the negative comments heavily
- Take the mick out of the negative commenter(s) or their comments
- If they have a good point, you might want to think about possibly changing your content
With good planning you can consistently get content to go popular on the social media sites, generate buzz and generate trackbacks.
I don’t think Digg is a complete waste of time. By investing a couple hours a week for a month into building a decent Digg network, you can get some quality articles to the front page. Also consider some Digg automation tools. They exist but I can not promote them here or now, sorry.
Once you get to the front page you will get 5000-20000 or more visitors. This will get you backlinks and subscribers if you have a blog.
Granted, Digg users will not buy your products or click on your sponsors, but it will generate traffic and some of them will subscribe or Stumble or bookmark your site.
It only takes 2 minutes to submit a post, and a couple more minutes to send shouts out to your friends. Shout to about 100 friends at a time, separate shouts be about 10-15 minutes so Digg doesn’t get mad.
interesting suggestions. i don’t know that digg is totally worthless – but it does take a lot to get things front paged.
I don’t think your tactic of belittling, downvoting negative commenters is particularly professional. Peoples opinions should be allowed to stand. The quality of the content should shine past any naysayers.
@Most Searched I know what you are saying, but sometimes a negative comment early in the game can really kill a story. Every once in a while it helps if you are ruthless.
The type of comments you really have to deal with are ones like this. Unless you are into SEO, you will not have had to deal with this type of thing.
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Most searched, in an ideal world, I’d be right with you, but wow in the real world, that’s incredibly naive. If you think that all the people voting up or down are altruistic and doing it out of the goodness and honesty of their heart, I’ve got some land to sell you… 🙂
I’ve seen it from both sides and trust me, your competitors are doing it if you aren’t. Sad, but true.
Really good article.
Not sure I agree with changing your content because someone has a good point though. There was a reason you wrote it in the first place. Content is king.
If you’re wrong, say you’re wrong. Move on. Both the good and the bad will play out in the long run.
I honestly think people will want to do business with the guy who is man enough (or lady who is woman enough) to admit that they are wrong.
I personally like to read how a whole line runs out. I especially enjoy it when people come to see a different side of things than they initially started out with.
Just my two cents worth.
Great article!
Great article I must say..so can we post your article to our E-Marketing site http://www.profitimo.com ? We will post your article to our Articles Section http://www.profitimo.com/Articles.aspx
Please do let me know..thanks. Sharmistha N
Hi Sharmistha, you are free to publish it as long as you place a link to this page on there.
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Interesting suggestions. i don’t know that digg is totally worthless – but it does take a lot to get things front paged.
Great post!
I’d like to know your opinion on Reddit.com, do you think it’s worth the same as digg.com?
I found this article searching for suggestions to promote your website on myspace and facebook. I have been commenting and adding a lot of friends suggesting them to visit my website or my profile and read a 3d animated comicbook I’ve created but found this interesting facts:
– I haven’t found a good way to promote on facebook. Maybe creating an application or posting the link to your website commenting on your friends’ “walls”. Haven’t created an app yet but I can tell you posting your link on friends profiles doesn’t get you a lot of traffic.
– On myspace all my friends are more interested on advertising their websites commenting on my profile and don’t even check out my comicbook! I have a flash file on my myspace profile and readers have to click for a second flash file loads inside the first one. I can track the times each file has been opened and from around 120 views of the first file there were only 7 who clicked to load the second file!!
I just wanted to share my experience with others who are thinking on promoting this way.