Gear Up Your Site for Social Media Marketing

The year 2006 saw the emergence of social media. If you are
engaged in operating a website, you must realign your site to
exploit the popular social media sites for increased traffic.

You should also introduce social media components to your site
because web users are experiencing these new form of interactions
in more and more sites and they may have an expectation of the
same from your site also.

If you want to attract repeat visitors and want them to stay
longer, your focus this year should be on the social aspects of
your site.

Social media use technologies like RSS, blogging, podcasting,
tagging, etc. and offer social networking (MySpace, Facebook),
social video and picture sharing (YouTube, Flickr), and
community-based content ranking (Digg, MiniClip) features.

The central theme of these sites is user generated contents used
for sharing among the end-users. The social aspects of these
sites are to allow users to setup social communities, invite
friends and share common interests.

You don't have to change your site completely within a month or
so to take advantages of these new technologies. Introduce small
changes incrementally through out the year and you will be on
your way to meet these new challenges.

The first step is to declare who you are to the online community.
People should be able to relate to you. Unless they know more
about you, you will be just an unknown identity and most people
don't like to deal with unknowns. Create an About Us page and
list your achievements and skills.

Create a MySpace page and link your bio in the About Us page to
the MySpace page. Also provide a link back from the MySpace page
to your website. Spend an hour every week to develop your online
social network in MySpace. Invite a few of these new friends to
write blog articles at your site about your products or
services.

Install a free blog software and start publishing at least one
article in your blog. Provide an easy bookmarking feature to
social bookmarking sites like delicious. This is done by
providing an action button for each article in your site. The
action button takes users to the submission page of the
bookmarking site.

Also, provide an action button for direct posting of blog
articles to digg. Digg is a popular news ranking site. A well
dugg article will bring thousands of visitors to your site.

Provide a forum at your site for users to discuss your products
and services. Don't delete negative comments because they provide
insights into the improvements needed to serve your visitors
better. However, censor hate speeches and meaningless bantering.
Register your forum at BoardTracker. BoardTracker is a forum
search engine.

If you are offering products, allow users to review and rate your
products. This will help you in inventory management because you
may want to discontinue low rated products.

Provide RSS feeds for your new products, blogs, forum postings,
etc. An RSS feed provides teasers of your contents. Users will
use RSS readers to scan your teasers and visit your site for more
information if the teasers draw their attentions.

Publish all your feeds at feedburner. Feedburner provides media
distribution and audience engagement services for RSS feeds. They
also provide an advertising network for your feeds. If you have
quality contents, you will be able to monetize your contents
using their services.

Create short how-to or new product videos and post these videos
in social video sharing sites like YouTube, Google video. Provide
a few start and end frames in these videos to introduce your site
with your site url. Post these videos using catchy titles,
teasing descriptions, and appropriate tags to make them
discoverable.

Provide embedded links to your posted videos in your site. This
will save your bandwidth and storage space because the videos
reside in the video sharing sites.

Besides videos, use social photo sharing sites like Flickr to
share pictures related to contents in your site. Use the same
title, description and tag techniques discussed earlier for
social video sites.

Provide a Send to Friend feature for all products and services
you offer. This feature is a link that sends the article, product
description, etc. to a recipient via e-mail.

For starter, Yahoo provides a service called Action Buttons
(search for Yahoo Action Buttons) that add links to your website
for users to share, save, and blog about your website. The Yahoo
action buttons use delicious for social bookmarking, and Yahoo
blog site for blogging. It also has a print feature.

The social media is not a fad. It is here to stay and bring in
profound changes to web surfers' experiences. It is the right
time for implementing features that will make your site social
media friendly. Also, using marketing techniques that utilize
popular social media sites, you will be able to bring traffic to
your site.