10.09.08

Digital Marketing Series: Tip #3

Tip #3: Create and update social networking profiles on all the major community sites, including those that cater to special niche interests.

Why It Works:
Social media sites are built around the idea of community-based sharing. They offer a great opportunity for you to keep in touch and exchange information with a large number of people at a time. By updating profile content and status as often as possible your friends and constituents are kept up to date with what’s going on in your world. Conversely, you also receive updates from those in your personal network, including job leads, events, and yes, even notices that they are on a bus or doing pilates.

Also, joining groups that reflect your intentions and endeavors will put you in touch with like-minded people or those who might be interested in your product or service. Finally, each of these sites offer the chance via your profile to link back to a company site, personal site, blog, or all of the above, thus generating more external links and increasing search engine ranking.

As with blogs, these sites only work as marketing tools if you keep them updated regularly. Each time you change your status, add a video, join a group or share a link it goes to the top of the list of network updates. But that goes for all the people in your network as well, so if you have 200 friends on Facebook, for instance, and they each make an update over the course of the day, yours will be at the bottom of the list by day’s end.

Resources:
Social site are cropping up on a near daily basis due in part to the huge popularity of sites like MySpace and Facebook. General sites are being usurped by niche social sites catering to users with very specific needs or interests. Shelfari and Good Reads cater to book lovers while Cork’d caters to wine afficianados, and so on. If you’re a business professional you probably already have a LinkedIn account, and maybe even a Plaxo profile, but there are many more resources out there for social media marketing as well.

This is by no means a thoroughly comprehensive list of social sites, but includes those we use most often:
LinkedIn
Facebook
MySpace
Crunchbase
Friendster
WhoHub (shared professional interviews)
Plaxo
Xing
Wis.dm (get questions answered)
Squidoo (create pages on shared topics)
Twitter (update your status)

Other niche sites:
Flickr (photo sharing)
Good Reads (for those who like books)
Shelfari (for those who like books)
Cork’d (for wine fans)
OddPodz (for the creative community)
FineTune (music)
imeem (music)
Last.FM (music)
Meetup
Yelp (restaurant and business reviews)

How We Have Embraced It:
I have created either personal or company profiles on all of the sites mentioned above and update them on a near daily basis. Sometimes the update is as simple as “Tim is getting ready for a conference.” Sometimes updates include videos, press releases, photos, news stories, links to relevant content, and so on. We also have configured our various profiles so that anytime an entry is added to the blog or News section of the Mightybytes site it is aggregated via RSS to our company Facebook page, Plaxo profile, Friendfeed account and several other places. I have set up my personal blog so that every time I post an entry my Twitter account gets an auto-Tweet. I almost always receive some sort of comment on the posted item, be it words of encouragement, shared facts, or just a friendly hello from someone I haven’t spoke to in a while.

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