Making the Most of Your Content for Blended Search - Taking it Social
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Before you start promoting your content in social media, you need to take the time to understand it. Social media is not about selling; it’s about having lots of conversations. The trick – one of them, anyway -- is to have those conversations with people who are genuinely interested in your content.
Many social media sites feature interest-focused groups that members can join. Users participate actively in these groups, sharing information; many belong to several. Searchles is a social bookmarking site, but I’m going to use them as an example because I’m a member. Here’s an image of the groups I belong to:
As you can see, I belong to 11 groups, and most of them are associated with some aspect of the search engine and SEO field. My preferences are set up to send me one email every day that lists all the links posted to Searchles in the previous 24 hours that were saved in at least one of those groups. I’d show you Searchles’ entire list of groups, but it went on for 44 pages the last time I checked.
Think about that for a minute. At 20 groups per page, that’s 880 groups. Searchles is just one social web site (and admittedly not the most popular one at that). With so many options, you’ll almost certainly be able to find several groups on a number of different social sites that would be interested in your content.
As I said before, however, you need to know what you’re getting into. Lee Odden notes that you should jump into social media not as a marketer but as a participant, and sums up social media participation basics as follows:
- Register and create a profile;
- Explore the community and “make friends;” and
- Vote, comment on and submit content.
I would add that if you want to be taken seriously, you might want to submit content from sites other than you own, in addition to your own content.
Next: Keep it Interesting and Remember the Basics >>
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