Getting Social with Your Blog » Aspects of Home Business Blog

Social media marketing has become one of my favorite ways to market a website. Most specifically I like StumbleUpon. It’s fun from both a user and a marketer perspective.

It’s best to first get to know StumbleUpon, Digg and other social media by using them as a user, not as a marketer. You need to get a feel for what people are after, and maybe to build a solid profile.

You absolutely do not want to be the marketer who bookmarks, diggs or stumbles his or her own posts only. People catch on fast, and your efforts will soon be dismissed, even if the quality of what you are offering is good.

Worse is if you’re doing that with no care for what people want to see. Promoting your quick work rather than your best is a rotten idea.

Getting Visitors to Socially Bookmark Your Site

It’s tough getting anyone to bookmark your site, whether it be in their bookmarks on their internet browser or in social media. But one of the delightful things about social media is that it’s easy to put up links to encourage people to think about it.

There are a few different ways to go about this. On this blog right now I’m using the AddThis plugin. It places a link for bookmarking that gives users a tremendous range of social media sites they can bookmark this site at.

Honestly, I’m often thinking that it’s overkill and really isn’t doing the job. While AddThis means that my posts can easily be bookmarked through any service, sometimes offering lots of options means you’re offering too many. But the stats are a nice feature.

You can do this service by service. A very good option to consider is to figure out which social media sites are your priority, and put up chicklets or links only to them. You do not want to have a bunch of them at the bottom of your site. Too many definitely gets confusing.

Digg also offers a nice way to integrate it into your posts. They provide a couple of options using Javascript that allow you to show how many times a given post has been dugg. The advantage is that if you’re getting dugg regularly, a high number shows how popular the post is. But if you aren’t getting many diggs, the constant 0 diggs showing on your posts can be a kind of drag. No one wants to know how unpopular you are! (grin!) Some of the other sites offer similar integration options.

But is the Traffic Any Good?

There’s the biggest question! Does social media marketing do you any good at all, aside from driving up your traffic stats?

Maybe…

Social media can be enough to take down your server. It rarely pays off in terms of immediate revenue.

traffic

What you do get varies by site. People like getting on the front page of Digg because it gets you in front of a lot of big bloggers, and they might link to you, as will smaller bloggers. The attention can overall do your site good.

In my experience, StumbleUpon can bring a lot of visitors who just bounce right back out of your site, but it also brings some who explore a little. You can get the host crashing peaks of traffic, but Stumble traffic also tends to endure longer. I can get bits of traffic for weeks for a given page that Stumbled well. It can also peak more than once.

Do Friends and Fans Matter?

Social media generally includes the ability to mark other users as friends or to be a fan of a member. Advantages can be both real and theoretical.

If you’re on Digg, for example, you can see what your friends have been digging, and they can see what you’ve dugg. You can send out shouts to friends to try to get more attention to things you want to do well.

You can do similarly with StumbleUpon, but people have theories about what else having friends and fans on there might do. Many think that if you have a lot of friends and fans, the power of your Stumbles goes up and you can send more traffic. It’s pure theory, but the idea is that you’ll only get a lot of fans if you stumble well, so a lot of them is a sign of trust.

Being a Good User

Bookmarking quality resources is part one of being a good social media user. Another part is writing quality reviews and comments about what you bookmark.

Posting good reviews and comments about the sites you bookmark helps to build your reputation. If you’re the first to bookmark a site, so much the better in many cases. Most will note who discovered a given page. This puts your profile right at the top and may even help you to come to the attention of the site owner.

I Want to Bookmark My Own Stuff! I Need the Traffic!

Go right on ahead. Just choose wisely.

On most services you should not bookmark every page of your site. It’s not too bad on del.icio.us, but on other sites that is a sure way to annoy other users.

If it’s traffic you’re after, don’t oversubmit your own work. If you already have some traffic, your best stuff may be submitted by users anyhow. It’s really nice when you don’t have to do your own submissions. Looks a lot better too.

It’s hard to resist, however, when you don’t have enough traffic to generate natural submissions. You’ll need to be highly critical of your own work, so that you can select that which is worth submitting, versus the ones that might not do the job.

On Digg you can send your friends a shout about things you would like to see dugg. That doesn’t mean do it every time you digg something. That’s a great way to shorten your friends list. You can also send pages to your StumbleUpon friends through the toolbar. Same principle, of course. Don’t do it much.

Overall, I have seen some good benefits from using social media. But the key word there is using. It won’t be nearly as useful to you if you see it only as a marketing tool.