Posts Tagged ‘social media’

If Abraham Maslow were alive, he’d tell us, “Told you so.” Social media’s rise to prominence in the Internet Age just confirms what the famous psychologist theorized in his Hierarchy of Needs many decades ago. Human beings have an overwhelming need to belong. Communities are popping up everywhere, and rapidly growing in numbers. People are sharing and interacting more and more with each passing minute.

Naysayers who pronounced that social media is nothing more than a fad may have to think twice. Universal McCann released a report on social media trends based on their worldwide survey. This is the third wave of this ongoing study of active Internet users (those who go online everyday or every other day), and the results show that from the first survey in 2006 to the latest one earlier this year, key markers have gone up across the board.

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With the advent of Web 2.0, social media has become an integral part of daily online life. It has become so powerful with its viral nature that succeeding in this arena may become a make or break deal for your website. If you plan to harness it, you might as well do it properly. Here are just a few tips.

1. Link Bait – The content on your site should be stuff that’s interesting and/or useful, the type that other people would want to link to and share with their friends. There are many ways to do this: having a blog on your site, offering free white papers, gathering breaking news, how-to articles, pictures, videos, statistics, and collections of multiple resources and tools.

2. Others First Policy – A common mistake rookies commit (including myself when I was starting out), is that they submit their own content to social media sites exclusively, right from the start. That’s a no-no. Build your reputation first as a source of great sites within the communities of these sites. Digg or Stumble other people’s content. Only when you get yourself a sizeable following should you start submitting your own.

3. Presentation – Now when you send other people to your site, make sure they’ll like what they see. Great content badly presented will not be terribly effective, negating all your hard work. So, make sure your ads, if any, don’t clutter up your pages. Check for the site design’s compatibility to major browsers and screen sizes. Add life to your pages by including relevant images. To make reading easier for your visitors, break the content down to sections and highlight the titles.

4. Buttons – All the popular social bookmarking sites have their own little buttons you could put at either the top or bottom of your post. If you’re using Wordpress or some other CMS, make them part of your template.

5. Discuss – Social media sites have their own groups and forums. Try to join the discussions on topics related to your site. If there are questions you can answer, by all means offer your take on things. This helps to boost your ranking among the community. In forums that permit it, you can put a link to your site on your signature.

6. Reciprocate – If someone Diggs your article or posts it on a forum, write a thank you note to that person. If he or she has a blog, try to see if you like any of the entries and return the favor. You can also ask if this person wants to exchange links, which is mutually beneficial for climbing the search engine rankings.

The keyword here is “social”. To be able to take advantage of social bookmarking sites, you have to become a part of the community, learn their culture, and use your knowledge to play the game (following the rules, of course). In social media, there are regular users and power users. When regular users submit a page, they get usually get modest traffic. In contrast, when power users submit a page, they are likely to generate traffic that would make servers cry. The difference? Power users have many friends within the community, and when they talk, people listen.

How do you become a power user?

1. Observe. Choose your preferred social bookmarking site and particular niche, then subscribe to it. The more specific the category, the better. Get a feel for the trends. Know what works and what doesn’t.

2. Keep ahead. Also, subscribe to the top blogs or sites related to your niche. Your RSS reader should have at least 20 of those. Some of these are probably among the most dugg sites already.

3. Branding. Join the site using a short catchy username, and an equally memorable avatar.

4. Get personal. Go to the Upcoming section and try to digg the ones you think will make it to the top. More importantly, be the first one to add comment of support. Add them as friend and check their profiles constantly to digg their other submissions. If you do this, they’ll most likely return the favor.

5. Test. Once you’ve accumulated about 50 friends or so, start digging posts from your own blog, one at a time. Don’t spam or you’ll get banned. Only your best posts should be dugg. See how much diggs you can get automatically, and how close you can get to Digg’s homepage. You might need to ask a little help from your friends first so that they know about your site. If you fall short of the number of diggs needed, just go back to #4 and expand your network. Remember, it’s all about being social.

Every blogger dreams about creating viral content, infecting people with your ideas and being the talk of the town. But how exactly does one go about it? Unfortunately, there really aren’t hard and fast rules. Even experienced bloggers will tell you that luck has a lot to do with it. It’s a matter of great timing and having the right people spread your post, creating that domino effect.

There are, however, some pointers you can follow, and if lady luck should smile upon you, your content may just spread like wildfire. So before you click that “Publish” button, check if you have done your due diligence on the following:

Quality
Content will not go viral if it isn’t special. Your topic should be unique, and your grammar near flawless. If it has pictures or videos included, a bit of polishing may be in order. Also, make sure you do thorough research on the subject, which should be relevant to your niche.

Quantity
Lists are some of the perennial fixtures in the viral content sphere. It’s been proven that people love “Top 10” and “Best of” listings. If you can extend that to “Top 100”, better – as long as you don’t sacrifice the overall quality of the article, of course.

Originality
With the sheer volume of content flying around, you’ve got be quite unusual to get noticed. Either that, or you’re the first to announce something huge that will blow people away. The point is, viral content must be something that jolts people and makes them go, “OMG!”

Controversy
It’s true what they say: “Bad publicity is still publicity.” Don’t be afraid to publish unpopular opinions. Debate and controversy make people engaged in a discussion. If they get emotionally invested in your story, they’ll be more likely to tell other people about it.

Study
Learn what other people are doing. Go to Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon, and all the other leading social bookmarking sites. Find out what’s hot and analyze what makes them click. Get some tips on how to write a proper viral headline, and see if there’s a common denominator in terms of writing styles.