Marketing in the social media arena can result in massive numbers of new links to your site, thousands of new targeted visitors, and even create a dialogue with your constituents.

While sometimes things happen overnight, preparing your content for success in social media is definitely the recommended route. In my post on 5 easy social media wins, #4 was to submit to social news sites. This post delves deeper into submitting content to social sites, and should help you get more mileage out of your submitted content.

An account on a social bookmarking site, social news site, or social networking site will be a lonely profile, likely only to get a fraction of attention for very worthy content than a well connected profile and account. Absent the connections, one has to get pretty lucky for proper exposure of their content.

A new submission to a social news site often goes into a queue or long list of other submitted content on its own page, not directly to the homepage. If content is submitted at an inopportune moment, it may disappear in a matter of minutes without ever making even the slightest impression.

So with this bleak view of social media marketing also comes the planning of a social media marketing campaign and preparing your content in the process.

1. Research Vertical Social Media Outlets.
Green news is popular right now, and has the potential to do well in a slew of places. But posting to Digg, like everyone else, may be less successful than a well-executed blog outreach to sites in the green “vertical” like treehugger.com and inhabitat.com, and better yet, their smaller cousins. Also, smaller social sites do exist, and success can be found in treehugger’s digg-like site, hugg.com. Many verticals have social news and networking sites that can be identified during this stage. Relying on Digg and Reddit as the “only” social sites worth the effort is a mistake.

2. Research Headlines and Bylines.
With outlets identified for your content, you will want to see what makes some content rise to the top over others. Examine the top content versus the ignored content on the sites a minimum of one mid-week afternoon (EST) for U.S.-based sites, and preferably over a few days to a week (or longer!), and then at different times of the day. Trends may be difficult to see, but look for descriptive adjectives in addition to questions, humor and/or sarcasm, and general tone.

3. Research Content.
On a schedule as above, examine the actual content. What makes top content more interesting, engaging, and newsworthy than ignored content? Look for editorials versus photos versus interactive tools. If all of the top content is of a certain form, you will be better prepared for how to package your content for each social site. Do not have a cookie-cutter approach when submitting to multiple sites.

4. Research Top or Active Users.
You’re looking for frequent contributers as well as new users. Buddying up with a frequent contributer who adds content all of the time may allow that person to submit your content with greater success than submitting it yourself. However, by the time you’ve developed that relationship, you’re probably already pretty popular yourself. New users may love a personal message that you thought they’d like the content you’re submitting, so you want to have a mix of friends ready to promote you.

5. Take the Social Media Plunge!
If you haven’t already had to sign in and create full, descriptive profiles, now is the time to start. Vote frequently and seek out tons of friends! Spend some time outside of the social site exploring the vertical. When you come across content that might do well, submit it! Discover and push other people’s content so that they will in turn do the same for you.

And have fun!

Filed under: Education and Training, Non-Profits, Social Marketing on Friday, October 12th, 2007 by Jacob Wolfsheimer |
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