Here’s a social marketing plan to build your brand on the social bookmarking and social networking websites:
1. Be there or be square. The value of social media is in the relationships. Online relationships are just like offline relationships. If you aren’t there, you have no relationship. If you work at finding friends for 5 days, then go away for 6 weeks and come back, it’s not the same. You can’t just pick up right where you left off. That’s not how “social” works, online or offline.
You have to apply consistent, day-to-day attention, or you’ll just waste your time. And the more consistent you are, the more you remind people of your brand. Your market can potentially find you through every action you do. So be active on the social marketing websites. Every action you take opens the door for people to connect with your website or your blog or you.
2. Speaking of consistent – if you want to use the social media, it’s good to REALLY learn a handful of social bookmarking or social networking sites. Choose the same username for each. This increases your presence, gets you more notice, makes you more … social. If you want to promote your blog, maybe you focus on Technorati, StumbleUpon, and Digg. Start out by targeting 10 minutes a day on each, and do it. Keep a consistent message across all your social marketing profiles, consistent voice, style, topics you cover, avatar, etc. Doing this reinforces both your image and your brand.
3. Support the entire StumbleUpon community … or whichever sites you focus on. If you spend time on a forum, you’ll sometimes hear the guests grouse about the “drive-bys”. Those are the forum visitors who post once about whatever it is they’re promoting and then disappear for months … until they post about the next thing they’re promoting. They add no value to the group. They have no sense of community. They are looked on as scum by the “residents”. It’s tempting to just promote yourself. Millions of people use these sites. But what actually happens is, people take more notice of you when you become a useful social marketing resource. And that entices other social networkers to share your blog and speed up your popularity. If all you ever do is point to yourself, those others won’t participate as much.
4. Ride the “social” wave. If you do the first 3 items on this list, then you will have put yourself in position for #4. When your social marketing appears consistently across several social media and you demonstrate your desire to give people the best results possible when they search your niche, you will build a following.
And, of course, that’s why you joined most of these social marketing sites in the first place.
