Social Marketing

Increase your Linkability. Static sites are a thing of the past, especially in terms of popularity. One of the best ways to have a voice online and be able to update your site daily is to have a blog. This allows you to have an RSS feed where people can catch up on your latest content.

Make Tagging & Bookmarking Easy. This means have your website setup so that it is easier for people to link to you. Such things can include buttons for submitting your site to Digg or tagging your site at Del.icio.us. Reward Inbound links. This can be done by linking back to the people who link to you, visit their site and leave comments on their blog or generally help promote their site socially.

Help your Content travel. This is basically allowing your content that isnt’ specifically text spread around the web. Podcasts can be added to podcast directories while Video’s can be submitted to the likes of Youtube and Metacafe.

Encourage the mashup. Youtube’s success relied a lot on people being able to embed their videos elsewhere. Allow your content to be used elsewhere, a good example of this can be to ensure your updating content has an RSS feed.

Be a User Resource. This means having quality content on your site and being a place that people can come back to for the best content on a particular niche. This is also advised even if producing the content doesn’t necessarily help you in terms of financial gain or even if it means linking out to your competitors.

Reward Users. If people are being active on your website submitting your content to places or leaving comments then reward them. Run a competition or just email them to show your appreciation. They will like the fact you recognise them and like what they are doing.

Participate. The best way to understand the enjoyment users get from being social on some of the top websites is to get in there and do it yourself. Not only that but comment on the blogs you read in your niche and encourage discussion on relevant forums and communities.

Know how to Target your Audience. Make sure you know who you are marketing. It would obviously be great to have everyone using your…mortagage calculator tool but you have to be realistic in terms of the chances of that happening.

Create Content. Not just any content, but content that is remarkable or unique, content that can easily spread. No matter what industry you are in there is something unique you can create, whether it will spread or not is another matter but you have to create it to try.

Be Real. Don’t try and be something your not, don’t try and claim you do something you don’t. Transparency is accepted and respected, blatent marketing where it isn’t wanted is only bad for your name and the name of your company.

Choose your Tactics Wisely. 1% of people in Social Media are creating content, 9% will enrich the content and 90% of people are consuming the content, that is a lot of leverage. Work out what tactics have given the best outcome and work to re-produce those efficiently.