The big social media marketing myth

Lot’s of people blindly throw statements around such as:

• “digg is a great way to promote your site”
• “get free blog traffic from digg”
• “increase your brand exposure on social news sites”

While hitting it big on one of these sites is a great way to gain links, traffic and exposure, what these people neglect to tell you is that it is very tricky to do so.

Writing great content is unfortunately not all it takes – it’s a little like the old saying “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”.

Great content won’t guarantee social media marketing success

While there’s no point even trying submitting poor quality content to the social news sites just having a great article on a popular topic is, unfortunately, not enough to guarantee social media success.

In the past I’ve submitted what I considered to be top quality content to a few social news sites only to see them go no further than the millions of other articles about nothing-much-in-particular and spam – even though I felt mine deserved to do a lot better!

What was I doing wrong? The same thing a lot of people do wrong when it comes to social media marketing. I wasn’t interacting enough with the places I was trying to market my articles and content.

Give first and you will receive later

You only get back out what you put in. If you spend no time actually using sites like digg. If you never add quality content that is not your own content; if you don’t build up a network of other like minded friends; how can you ever expect to have success with your own content on these sites?!

This is the key to social media marketing success: interaction, participation and network building.

If this sounds like hard work, I’m afraid to tell you that, unfortunately, it is. You may think the hard part is writing the engrossing, quality content but unfortunately that is only half the battle. You have to spend a large chunk of time actually using one or two of these social media sites. You need to build up networks of friends who share similar interests as you so when you post something to digg the article gets that first 20 or so diggs to rise it above the general crap hardly anyone sees.

Digg is arguably the hardest (though also most rewarding) social media site to achieve any success with so if you’re just starting out with this ‘whole social media thing’ I would give it a miss for now (unless you can bribe one of the top diggers to submit you’re content…).

Try out some of the ’second tier’ social networks. They’re often underrated and easier to achieve success on. I also read an interesting post lately about the domino effect of small social media news sites. Essentially what he’s taking about is submitting an article to some of the much smaller social media sites like dzone (a [web] developer’s news site). And then optimising the articles to be easily book marked with social bookmarking services like del.icio.us and submitted to some of the medium sized social news and discovery sites like stumbleupon. And then if you’re really lucky it can domino all the way to the digg front page!

I quite like this tactic because it’s clearly a lot easier than targeting some of the mega social media news sites directly.

Check out some of these other articles on social media marketing:

• Internet marketers guide to stumbleupon
• How to be a master in the dark art of social marketing

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1. Can social media marketing be performed in-house?
2. So you want to get social?
3. Review Of The 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan
4. Should SEO copywriter’s jobs be evolving?
5. The Hottest SEO Trends

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