Social Media Marketing

A few days ago Twitter announced on their status blog that all Twitter users are only allowed to follow a maximum of 1000 people a day. This rule was designed to cut down on ‘follow spam’, the act of following many Twitter users in order to get them to follow you back or click on your links.

When combined with the already existing limit based on follow ratios, this means that it will be more difficult for marketers or self-promoters to rapidly increase their Twitter follower count by following many people. The old days of following thousands of users a day to get thousands of followers back are gone.

A fundamental aspect of marketing is to gain the attention of a target audience and engage or redirect it in a way which fulfills specific objectives, such as a positive increase in reputation, legitimacy, mindshare, exposure (visitor traffic), sales and captured leads (subscribers, users, clients etc).

In terms of online marketing, social media channels offer many opportunities. Some webmasters focus on setting up profiles with self-serving user generated content only for backlinks and traffic. Other savvy brands or individuals actively interact with online communities while moderating the impulse to ’spam’, in order to build legitimacy, authority and a better reputation in the specific field.

A while ago I wrote about using selective reporting to frame news, grab attention and make your content stand out from the rest of the competition. Now lets looks at creating original content specifically for a social media channel. How do you increase the chances of your article striking a nerve and spreading like wildfire within a specific community?

The answer is simple. I’ve mentioned it before. First of all, you need to start by gathering tactical knowledge on the specific website. Know your audience’s fetishes. Know what they love/hate and know what they talk about. Know what cliques exist within the community. Know what totems,  symbols, personalities and ideas are embraced by the general populace.

Why are some friendships short and fleeting while others may last for an entire lifetime? Apart from personality differences and many other reasons, communication (or the lack of it) is also a factor which determines the strength or longevity of social relationships.

According to a recent study of 2 million people and 8 million phone calls over one year, researchers discovered that the cause of persistent relationships is reciprocity – returning a friend’s call. The more often you call each other, the longer your relationship.

You’re interested in promoting your website and brand through social media but don’t know where to start. You don’t want to spend money hiring a marketing company and want to do-it-yourself. How do you get started?

Start by understanding that social media marketing is more than just putting up links whereever you can with the hope that they’ll send visitors to your site. One should endeavor to think beyond the hit-or-miss game of boosting pageviews.

Back in August 2007, usability guru Jakob Nielsen wrote about banner blindness and indicated that plain text, faces and cleavage (or other private body parts) were the three design elements most effective at attracting eyeballs. While Nielsen didn’t examine any popular internet websites specifically, this eye-tracking research holds true in many instances.

Take Youtube for example, it’s well known that the use of sexy screenshots can help your videos get a lot more exposure. People are much more likely to click through on videos showing cleavage or the body of an attractive male/female.

Why would you want to get more Twitter followers? What purpose does it serve? And what steps should you take to increase your Twitter followers? These are questions often asked by normal users, brands and business owners who not only see Twitter as a means of social interaction but an effective marketing platform.

You’re interested in increasing your Twitter followers. You want more people reading your updates. It’s not difficult to build a prominent profile but I think it’s important to start with the right understanding. This is the first thing you need to know: It’s not really about how you tweet, what you say or who you talk to but who you are.

Most social media websites give you an individual profile page alongside the option of befriending other site users. The adding of someone as a ‘friend’ on a social media website is not just an empty gesture. Usually when you add someone as a friend, you’re giving them greater access to you through the social media channel.

For example, some Digg users set their message inbox as ‘friends only’, so you can only ’shout’ or communicate with other users through the site when they have added you as a friend. Only when someone on Twitter ‘follows’ or adds you, will you have the ability to send them private messages or view his/her updates, if they are protected.

Social media aggregators are web sites which amass what you do on social networks or websites and centralize it all in one location.

These aggregators enable lifestreaming, which is a simply the publication and sharing of your daily activities in continuous sessions. These social lifestreams allow you to keep track of what your friends or other people are doing online.

In other words, they are tools you can use to observe the activity of others on various social sites or allow others to follow what you’re doing all around the web.