August 25, 2007

Social Media Marketing Tips From SES San Jose 2007

What can link bait do for you?

A year ago Social Media Marketing was still known to just a handful of people. This year it has grown in awareness and interest.

The panel at SES was moderated by Detlev Johnson, VP, Director of Consulting, Position Technologies and the speakers were:

Neil Patel, Co-founder, ACS
Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOMoz
Todd Malicoat, Independent Search Engine Marketing Consultant, stuntdubl

Pay attention to the hook and write to attract readers was Mailcoat's advice. Here are some of his hook ideas

attack
humor
contrarian (contrary opinion)
news
resource
ego
picture/movie

You can read more of his tips here

Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz offered some good takeaways with ideas on which social media sites to use for different objectives. He says Stumble Upon is the second highest driver of traffic to his site.

Neil Patel commented that the social media audience is young. He shows an example of what works - 4525 diggs for "Pictures of the craziest urinals from around the world".

However this is not the only type of content that gets attention on a social media site. Vision.org, site that covers current social issues, recently got several hundred diggs for an article about the neuroscience of motherhood. Sure it was only hundreds, not thousands of votes. But it was enough to bring over 5000 interested visitors to their site and build some valuable links.

As Mailcoat pointed out you can get 30-40,000 "nearly worthless" visits, lots of scrapers and tons of backlinks if you get thosands of digg votes. But what you really want is trusted links from high profile industry sites. You may get only 10 of them out of the thousands of junk links.

Creating the right kind of link bait content takes thought and skill. And you have to place it on the right site. That means you need to already have a profile on the social sites that make sense for your business.

So before you rush in where angels fear to tread, get egg on your face and a hoard of worthless visitors stomping through your website, do some homework. Learn how social media works and put a social media strategy in place.