Improved Results with Social Media: Week One
Most of the questions that I receive by email from readers and from other bloggers have to do with the basics of getting better results with social media. Most bloggers want to tap in to the potential of social media sites as a source of traffic and new readers, but I get a lot of comments from people who are struggling to put it into action.
While social media marketing and optimization provides an incredible opportunity for website owners who want to make a big impact without spending a lot of money to advertise, using social media with the wrong approach can easily result in a lot of wasted time, and in some cases it can even do more harm than good.
I’ve had a few requests from readers who wanted a step-by-step guide for marketing a site with social media, so I’ve decided to put together a small series of posts that will explain the approach I would recommend to those who are looking for better results.
The focus of the series is to break down the steps that are necessary in order to get a blog or a website noticeable results within a month. There will be four parts to the series and each will look at the steps that should be taken in a particular week.
The activities of each week will be broken down into specific action steps that can be taken regardless of the content or niche of your blog. Additionally, I’m assuming that readers don’t have endless amounts of time, so each week’s activities are very realistic.
The idea here is to create a basic plan that anyone cal follow for real results. New bloggers can use it to get their blog off the ground quickly, and others who have been around for a while can use it to start getting the results they’ve been after for a while. Let’s get started.
Week One:
For the first week it’s important that we establish a strong foundation for the efforts that will be taking place in future weeks. If you compromise and rush through these activities, chances are your results will suffer. There’s not a whole lot of exciting action taking place at first, but it’s necessary to get things moving in the right direction.
1. Decide What You Want from Social Media
The first thing that you should do is to come up with a specific idea of exactly what it is you hope to gain from social media. In most cases we associate SMM with generating a lot of traffic, but traffic in itself is worth very little. Ideally, this traffic will be converted into something useful, such as subscribers, inbound links, branding, name recognition, or even sales (of course, some things are more difficult to accomplish than others).
Without know exactly what you hope to accomplish you’ll be unlikely to accomplish anything significant. Everyone’s approach and reasons for marketing a site are different, so there’s not a right or wrong answer, you just need to know what you are working towards. Take a little bit of time to think about your own situation if you’re not already certain about what you want to accomplish.
2. Pick Two or Three Social Media Sites to Target
One of the biggest reasons for failure with social media marketing is being spread too thin. If you try to use a whole bunch of different social media sites, you’re unlikely to get decent results with any of them. My advice is to pick one or two of the major social media sites to target (StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Delicious, etc.) and one or two niche sites or smaller second-tier media sites (like Mixx).
Most people tend to gravitate towards Digg because of its popularity and reputation. I don’t suggest targeting Digg unless you have a lot of time to spend building a profile or a large and well-established network of friends that use Digg. My recommendation is to make StumbleUpon your first priority with the major social media sites, and pick one or two niche sites (if they exist in your niche).
StumbleUpon is much better than Digg for the average blogger, because Digg is all or nothing. If you’re not on the front page with Digg, it’s not going to do anything significant for you. On the other hand, StumbleUpon has big potential, similar to Digg, but there’s also a middle ground for pages that can still produce considerable results, unlike Digg.
With StumbleUpon it only takes a few thumbs up to get some decent traffic, and the algorithm loves new sites. Each time a StumbleUpon user gives a thumbs up to a particular site, it will gradually have less and less impact. As a result, new sites can fairly easily get a lot of traffic because everyone that gives a thumbs up to one of its pages is doing so for the first time, and that carries more weight with the algorithm.
Additionally, StumbleUpon has so many different categories that anything can have a home there. Digg and some other major social news sites have a lot of different categories, but not nearly as many as StumbleUpon.
3. Start to Use These Sites Everyday
Once you have you targeted sites identified, create accounts if you haven’t already. Get in the habit of visiting these sites every day. Visit the items that are listed there, vote for what you like, leave comments if that is an option, and add some “friends” and interact with other users. Some sites, like StumbleUpon, have toolbars or other useful resources that can be used to make it easier. Take advantage of what is available.
At first, don’t worry about submitting a lot of content or getting traffic to your own site. The most important thing is to get involved at your targeted social media sites, make yourself visible by voting and commenting, and pay attention to the types of content that are generating a lot of interest. If you do submit items right away, it’s usually best to submit content from other sites at first, rather than submitting your own the moment you join the social media site.
As you’re visiting these targeted social media sites, evaluate the popular content for the following items:
- Content type and subject matter
- Headlines/titles
- Who submitted it?
- How many votes are required to become “popular”?
- Is “popular” content being self-submitted (person owning the website is submitting his/her own content)?
- What type of comments are being left?
Getting to know the sites you are targeting is critical to your success. Without knowing the audience, what they like, and what is appropriate to market there, you will just be throwing out blind submissions, and loyal users of the sites may even feel like you’re spamming if your submissions aren’t in line with what usually happens there.
As you’re using these social media sites, try to pay attention to see if your blogging friends or others in your niche are using the same sites. If so, there should be opportunities where you could help each other to promote content. It may even be a good idea to get in touch with other bloggers in your niche to ask them if they’re using the same social media sites, and send a link to your profile. Building a network of other users can help you at any social media site.
4. Brainstorm for Post Ideas
The last thing that you should do during your first week is to start brainstorming for post ideas that would target the audiences of these specific social media sites. Since you’ve spent some time this week getting familiar with the sites and their users, paying attention to the content that has done well, you should be able to apply this knowledge to come up with some post ideas of your own.
Ideally, you’ll want to find some topics that will generate interest for social media audiences, but will still be highly relevant for your blog and help you to work towards your goals. In other words, don’t go way off subject just to create content that will appeal to social media users if it has nothing to do with the topic of your blog.
Dedicate some time to just coming up with lots of ideas, don’t worry about writing the content at this point. For more on brainstorming, see 3 Ways to Develop Unique Blog Post Ideas,and Idea Development: The Most Important Phase in Social Media Marketing.
Improved Results with Social Media: Week TWO
Last week I started a four-week series of posts that is intended to help readers who are new to social media (or those who are just looking for better results) to have an organized and focused approach that will lead to some success. If you missed the first post in the series, you may want to read that one, as the contents of this post will pick up where that one ended.
In effort to make this series as practical and usable as possible, the activities for each week will be broken down into specific steps that should be taken. This week we’ll focus on taking action and moving towards that first successful social media post. So let’s start week two’s activities.
1. Continue to Use Your Targeted Social Media Sites Everyday
Last week we talked about the need to target a few specific social media sites rather than just taking a general approach. The reason for this is that as a new social media marketer you will need to be very active at these sites in order to maximize your results, and it’s just not possible to be active everywhere.
Since you should already have your targeted sites chosen, you’ll now need to continue to visit them on a daily basis and become an active user. Vote for submissions that you like, leave comments on submissions, add friends, and even submit some items if you find any that would be appropriate for that particular site.
As a new user, it’s best to submit items from sites other than your own at first. If active users notice a new account that has started submitting his or her own content right away and not really been active in other ways, it throws up a big red flag.
The goal here is to be truly social and get integrated into the communities of your targeted sites. Each social media will have its own community, and in order to help your chances for success, you’ll need to be useful member of the community.
You don’t need to spend hours at these sites each day, but set aside at least a little bit of time to start to build a profile. As you’re on these sites each day, continue to pay attention to the types of content that are doing well and to the content that is not doing well. You may want to subscribe to some RSS feeds from your targeted sites to save yourself some time. Knowing how an audience will likely react to a submission is a huge part of the process.
2. Take One Idea from Your Brainstorm and Develop a Post
At the end of week one we looked at the need to brainstorm for ideas of content that you could use to target social media audiences. By now you should have a better idea of what types of content are getting results for others, so you’ll want to take that into consideration as you choose the first idea to develop. Of course, you don’t want to copy the ideas that others have had success with, but you want to pay attention to the type of content. For example, you may see that users of a particular social media site tend to vote for resource lists, controversial articles, or some other specific type of content.
Before you start to write the post or put the content together, take some time to plan out the post to make sure that it is well thought out. I like to outline posts before writing as it helps me to get end results that are more thorough and organized.
As you’re developing the content, don’t skimp on time. It’s better to put in twice as much time and actually get positive results than it is to rush through it and wind up with something that doesn’t generate much interest. Especially at first, you’ll need to create something that is exceptional to get the best results.
Pay attention to formatting and layout of the post. Regardless of the type of content, make sure that it is easily readable and scannable. Use plenty of whitespace, short paragraphs, headers and sub-headers, bold text, lists, and anything else that will make it easier for visitors to quickly read the content. Formatting has much more of an impact on social media users than you may realize.
Also, using photos really tends to help with content that targets social media. You can either buy stock photos at sites like iStockphoto or StockXpert, or browse through Creative Commons photos at Flickr.
Another important issue that deserves plenty of attention and consideration is the post title. Titles can make or break the success of a post, so don’t just give it the first title that comes to your mind. This is another area where it is helpful to observe what types of titles are drawing results at your targeted social media sites.
For more details on creating content that will draw results, see How to Target Social Media with Specific Posts.
3. Publish and Submit to Your Targeted Sites
Once your post is ready and it has been proofread for mistakes, you’ll need to decide on a time for publishing. Timing can play a factor in terms of how many readers will see it and how much exposure it will get with social media. Typically, the weekends will draw less traffic, and Monday through Thursday will be the best days for getting exposure.
Personally, I recommend publishing this content Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. If you’re able to achieve success with a social media site the traffic will usually last for a few days before tailing off. If you’re able to get that success early in the week you’ll have time to benefit from its peak before the weekend when the numbers will decrease faster. However, there are some benefits to posting on the weekend that can be considered, such as the reduced competition.
Once you’ve published the content you’ll need to get it submitted to your targeted social media sites. Some sites, such as Digg, tend to look down on self submissions, so you may want to consider asking a friend to do it for you. At most sites however, you can submit your own content and it won’t be an issue.
Many established blogs do not worry about getting their content submitted because someone will do it anyway, but for newer bloggers who don’t have much of an established audience are unlikely to get their content submitted to social media if they don’t give it a boost themselves.
4. Give it a Push
You’ve now taken the time to target the right social media sites, study the types of content that do well, use that knowledge to craft your own content, and published and submitted the content. However, the job isn’t done yet. In order to get anywhere, you’ll need to get people to see your content or it will get no votes.
It’s important to consider that social media votes come from a few different sources. Some social media users will see content on the upcoming page and vote for what they like. Other votes will come for visitors on the website or blog itself. For example, sometimes I put Sphinn buttons on my posts here at Traffikd, and some of the readers see the button and give it a Sphinn (I do recommend using one or two buttons on your posts for your targeted social media sites). Other votes may come from requests made to other social media users. Most major social media sites have a method for allowing users to share requests, such as Digg’s shout feature, but this is also done by email and IM by a lot of people.
To help your content out and give it the best chance for receiving votes, consider sending a request to your friends that are social media users, but be aware that this can be a touchy situation. It’s a very common practice among bloggers and social media users, but not everyone appreciates it. My recommendation is to use your knowledge of your contacts that you know pretty well.
You probably have a good idea about who would be interested in helping you in this way, and who may be uninterested. Limit your requests to those that you know well, and don’t bombard them with requests. It’s always a good idea to offer to vote for their requests as well if they want to send them to you. If you have several friends who are interested in helping out, you may want to set up a group where everyone can help each other when votes are needed.
5. Watch Your Stats
In order to improve your results with future posts that target social media, you’ll need to know what worked and what didn’t. Pay attention to your stats. See where your traffic came from, how long people stayed on the site, how many pages they visited, how many subscribers you gained, etc. Stats can’t tell you the whole story, but especially at first they’re necessary to know if you’re on the right track or not.
6. Have Patience
Ok, this isn’t really a step, but it’s something that needs to be said. Even if you do everything right and you create a great blog post, it’s possible that you won’t get the results that you want. Especially for small blogs that don’t have much of an established audience, achieving success with social media is a challenge. If it doesn’t work on your first try, don’t get discouraged. Just learn what you can from your experience and keep trying and tweaking your approach as needed.
Looking Ahead
At this point in the series you’ve now started to establish your presence on your targeted social media sites and you’re working towards achieving your first success. Next week we’ll look at what you can do to build on this and to take it from a one-time thing to something that has more lasting results
Improved Results with Social Media: Week Three
This is the third part of a four-part series on improving results with social media. If you haven’t seen the first two articles, or if you want a refresher, please see:
Last week we looked at the process of developing a blog post for the purpose of targeting specific social media audiences. This week we’ll look at a few steps that will help to determine how successful we were and to build on that.
1. Continue to Use Your Targeted Social Media Sites Everyday
This is the same as the first step from week two, so there’s not a whole lot I need to go into here. Basically, in order to have a strong presence on your targeted social media sites, you need to be consistently active. Set aside a little bit of time each day to vote, comment, submit, and add friends.
2. Analyze Last Week’s Post
The steps from last week included publishing and promoting a post. Now it’s time to take a look at the stats and see how successful we were. Of course, there are some obvious stats you can look at, such as overall unique visitors, total pageviews, number of visitors from social media sites, etc. But don’t forget to also look at some other numbers, such as growth in subscribers and inbound links (you can track your blog’s Technorati rank over time to see an increase in in-bound links).
Remember the stats can only tell part of the story. In the first week of this series, our very first step was to decide what you wanted from social media. When you’re analyzing your results it’s easy to get distracted by numbers, but you must not lose focus of what is most important to you. For example, say that your priority is to increase exposure and branding, not so much about the number of visitors you receive. In this case you may want to gauge your success based on factors like links and mentions from other blogs, mentions on Twitter, and comments on your own blog as well as on social media sites.
Remember that it takes time to get results with social media. Simply creating one post that targets this audience is not enough to get serious results. An effecive social media campaign needs to involve an ongoing plan to help you reach your goals.
3. Learn Something New
During the first two weeks, we spent some time on the targeted social media sites with the intent of learning more about the site’s audience, what they like and what causes them to respond. This information was used along with your brainstorming to develop the content that was published last week. Now it’s time to learn something from your first hand experience.
Did the social media audience respond to your post in the way that you thought they would? You can evaluate the number of votes you got, the comments that were left by users, and the amount of visitors you received. On your first attempt you can’t expect everything to go exactly as planned, so take the opportunity to learn something from your experience that you can use for your future efforts.
If things didn’t go the way you had hoped, try to identify where the post came up short. Was it the content of the post itself? The formatting? The title? The title and description used on the social media sites? The profile of the submitter? A lack of a network to get votes? Once you can identify some weak points, you now have an area to focus on for the next attempt.
4. Continue to Network
From my experience, the two most important factors in social media success are 1) the content itself, and 2) the network of the blogger or the submitter (or both). Your network can consist of friends and contacts that you requeest votes from, your regular readers that are interested in voting for your content, and your friends on social media sites.
Keep making efforts to get to know other bloggers in your niche and keep working on building contacts with other users of your targeted social media sites. Well-connected bloggers are successful bloggers.
5. Think About Scheduling
As I said earlier, a social media campaign requires on-going work. Because these posts take time to develop, it’s important to think about your post schedule, how often you want to publish new content, and how often you want to make a push with social media. There’s no right or wrong approach to posting frequency, but for building results with social media you should be posting at least somewhat frequently. I would recommend at least a few times per week, with maybe one post per week, or one post every two weeks, for targeting social media.
When you’re working on your own posting plan be realistic about how much time you have available and how long it will take to develop quality content. It’s important not to rush so much so that the quality of posts drops below what is likely to get results from social media users.
6. Continue to Brainstorm and Refine Your Ideas
In the first week we took some time to brainstorm ideas for potential posts. As you continue to learn more by being involved at your targeted social media sites, and from your own experience with your posts, you will continue to get a better idea of what is likely to draw results.
Set aside some time to continue brainstorming for post ideas. If you’re going to be publishing content consistently, you’ll need to have a steady flow of ideas. Also, go through the ideas on your list from previous weeks and analyze them based on what you are currently learning about your targeted social media sites. You may find that some of these ideas are not perfect, but you may be able to tweak or refine them in some way that will make them more useful
Looking Ahead:
Next week will be the final edition to the series, so we’ll take a deeper look at setting yourself up for long-term results.
Improved Results with Social Media: Week Four
This is the final part of a four-part series on improving results with social media. If you haven’t seen the first three articles, or if you want a refresher, please see:
Throughout the first three weeks of this series we’ve taken a look at the process of setting your goals with social media, getting involved at some targeted sites, building a network of social media users, brainstorming ideas, and publishing your first content to target a social media audience. At this point hopefully you’ve had some success with social media, although it does take some time, so try to stay patient if things haven’t gone exactly as planned. Now our focus turns to refining the process and focusing on the big picture.
1. Continue to Visit Your Targeted Social Media Sites Each Day
If you’ve been reading through this series, you know that I feel it’s very important to be active at the social media sites that you’re specifically targeting. Being active is essential to understanding the users of the site and to build your own network. After you’ve been using the sites for a while and you’ve established some consistent success with social media marketing, you may want to cut back a little bit on your usage of the sites, but it’s important to still have an active presence.
2. Continue to Network
For those who are hoping to build a strong social media presence, the need for networking will never end. Keep meeting new people through social media sites and through blogs, and work on strengthening the connections you’ve already made. Everyone who is successful with social media marketing is well-connected.
3. Focus on the Details
Throughout this series, we’ve looked at the process of creating content specifically for the purpose of targeting social media users.We’ve focused on finding the right sites to target and on creating content that has a chance to do well with social media. At this point it’s helpful to look more at some of the specific details of the posts you’ve created with the purpose of targeting social media.
A lot of different factors can influence the success of a post with social media. In order to maximize your success you’ll need to focus on some specific details of the post, such as the time of publishing and submission, formatting of the post, headlines, etc. At this point you’ve probably published a few posts in the past month, so take a look at the posts and see how they could be improved to be more appealing to social media users.
In order to test things and see what works, try mixing things up in terms of when you publish and how you format the posts. Pay attention to the results to see what works best for you. In most cases you’ll find that publishing early in the week will work best, and formatting posts to be easily scannable is important.
4. Look Back at Your Goals from Week One
The very first step of this whole process was to decide specifically what you wanted to accomplish with social media. Maybe you wanted more subscribers to your blog, or maybe you wanted to gain exposure to a wider audience and work on developing a brand. At this point it’s helpful to go back and look at your original purpose. Has your work through the past four weeks helped you to get closer to achieving this?
It’s possible that through your first month of experience with social media marketing, you may have realized that your initial impressions and assumptions were off and what you set out to accomplish may not be the best approach to take. If this is the case, now is the time to re-evaluate your priorities with social media and focus on developing a sustainable plan to get you there. I’m sure you’ve learned a lot through being active for the past four weeks, so be sure that you allow yourself the flexibility to adjust your priorities and your goals as necessary.
5. Focus on Sustainability
Now that you have gone through the process of jumping in to social media marketing for the past month, you’ll need to develop a plan that you’ll be able to carry out successfully over a longer period of time. You’ll want to think about the social media sites that you have been targeting. Do you still feel that they are the best platforms to promote your site? If not, don’t be afraid to change things up and move your activity to other sites.
Think about your schedule and how much time you’ll realistically be able to spend on social media sites and developing content to target these users. There’s no right or wrong approach to posting schedules, but it’s important to have some sort of plan or schedule if you hope to be able to sustain the success on a longer term.
Conclusion
I hope this series has been helpful for those of you who were looking for some step-by-step content for getting started and improving results with social media. If you have questions or if you would like to see any part of the process covered in more detail, please leave a comment.
