How to make love to the Social Media beast

How to make love to the Social Media beast

I have played in the ecommerce world for a long time. There are several truths that stand out as the end all in how Social Media works:

1. You must give first and must give big.

The last time I was in London I had some time off and walked around Hyde Park. In my wanderings I went over to speakers corner “soap box for all use Americans” to listen to the speakers.

This process of standing on the corner and trying to engage people is exactly how we approach Social Media. We stand up in the crowd and start spouting our message. The difference is that we have many more soap boxes to speak from and we have the benefit that if someone likes what we are saying they will pass along our ramblings via a better amplification system.

Over the years I have come to the realization that it is all about quantity and all about the quality of the message. This is in contrast to the prevalent belief that it is all about quality. You must have lots of quantity especially in the beginning stages of developing a new Social Media campaign.

You must have quality or you will be ignored and worst yet, heckled by the Social Media masses.

But…

The quantity will allow you to keep ramming the idea that “I am here, listen to me and take notice.”

Without the quantity you will be quickly forgotten and the next upstart that produces more than you do will knock you off the top of the hill and claim that “I am the new king of the mountain.”

The higher education industry has it right “Publish or Perish.”

2. Your content will be pirated, find ways to keep your name and link attached so you can keep good juice. You must be creative and you must be diligent. Remember this is how we make our living and every time good ol’ John Wilkerson places content on the web he tries his best to make certain the web will reward him with good karma.

Keeping the good juice is not all about building backlinks for page ranks. It is about building backlinks for the purpose of people being able to find you or your companies site so they can spend money. We are all in this game for different reasons, but the real reason we do this is to make money.

3. Twitter is just OK, it is not the magic crystal ball. If you take this single post and it is shared by 10 people through Twitter each with an average of 5,000 followers that will yield 50,000 potential recommended please read this hits. In reality, the pass through for Twitter is very small.

4. The title of your content is the most important part of your writing. Yes you must have qualified content that is engaging but you only have 1 maybe 2 seconds to close the deal for a prospective Social Media junkie to review your offering. Hot and sexy will always do better than frumpy and cold. One of my earlier blog posts touches on this subject and how to involve the employees to help build a FaceBook presence.

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John Wilkerson is a Marketing/Sales Professional specializing in online branding, ecommerce sites, blogging, email advertising, content creation, print media, and direct mail. Follow @johnwilkerson

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