When I first started making money online in the late 90’s, there was no such thing as social media. My marketing strategy centered around the search engines.
I spent my days altering meta tags and on-page keywords trying to climb to the top of sites like Infoseek, Webcrawler, Excite, Lycos, HotBot and AltaVista. (Memorieeeeees!)
The closest thing to social media was probably forums (known as message boards or bulletin boards back then) and chat rooms.
In 2010, there are so many more ways to promote your site, and many of the methods revolve around social media.
It provides many advantages for Internet marketers and allows us to network like never before. Plus, thanks to smartphones, you’re always connected to your audience.
Stories, websites and e-books about social media success are everywhere. There are even people like Maria Andros who built their entire business using Twitter, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook.
Then there’s the other side of the coin. What about those who spend hours on social media websites, but never see results? They often conclude social media is a waste of time and more of a distraction.
So what gives? Why are people like Maria able to get all of their business and exposure through social media while other people struggle to see any results?
To put it simply, it boils down to strategy and execution. If you are going to depend on social media for success, you have to use it consistently and everything you do should be based around your overall strategy.
Some would say that posting a few links on Twitter every so often is not really much of a social media strategy if you want solid results. Study people who have built their business on social media and you’ll see they do much more than that.
They post consistently (multiple times per day), hold contests, engage their followers by polling, asking questions, they start meaningful discussions, network with other users, etc. Some even share their personal lives to help their audience connect with them.
I would consider myself a very light social media user and I’m far from a social media expert. To be honest, I’m not exactly in love with it like many affiliate marketers.
By the way, I love how the title social media expert gets thrown around nowadays. What are the qualifications for earning that title anyway? Is there a certain number of followers you have to reach? Do you have to use a minimum number of social media sites? It just seems like one of the buzz words people like to throw around.
Anyway, I digress…
I use social media to promote blog posts, videos, share thoughts, answer questions, etc. but I don’t really spend much time on complex strategies.
Not that I don’t think social media is useful, it’s just never been a large component of my marketing plan. And the great thing about the Internet is that it doesn’t have to be.
However, if you want to become good at social media marketing and you want results, you have to be consistent and develop a strategy instead of just making random posts/updates once in a while.
What are your thoughts on social media? How does it play into your marketing strategy? Do you find it more distracting than helpful? Also, if you just started your website in the last couple of years, do you think you have to master social media in order to succeed?
Hi Lisa..
Social Media Indeed is the latest marketing tool for brand promotion. It has been used to drive huge traffic to a website.. And until now the number of the business who used this tool are still counting. Actually i am one of those people who used social as a marketing too and i found it more effective than just distributing contents to relevant sites..
That is why i do agree with your post very much.
Thanks for sharing 😀
Hi Lisa
I agree about your thoughts on social media. This is the best way if anyone wants to get traffic on their sites. Social media sites give way to keep viewers engaging regularly as they follow every post or hit the like button. Actually, I used social media as a tool for my sites and I find it better!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Its the alternate way to engage with the people.Social Media can is effective in helping you to drive the traffic and help to build your business also.
Social media is a great way to increase your reputation. It can be a good used for promoting website’s or products. It is also a way to communicate to others. Nevertheless, Social media is good for sharing ideas.
Social media is a very big platform and everyone can make use of the social media for mutual benefits. If we use it for positive growth its certainly helpful but it can become a distraction if we do not know the limits.
People want to know, like and trust you before listening to what you have to say. If they know that all you care about is money and not about them, why should they even listen to you? Creating a good relationship with someone can take from somewhere between 3 to 6 months, do you have that time to wait till you see any form of result?
Social media sites are very good for sharing contents 🙂
I think, Social media sites are good for sharing our web contents with the world easily. Thanks for this piece of information.
I think social media mostly help us to make friends, but people all don’t like to see you promote your biz to them, because they all just want to talk about funny something.
Social media is a way to get in touch with possible clientele in a non-traditional form. The most essential part of the phrase is social. When making use of these platforms it is essential not just to plug a product. Social media is brought in to start out discussions and create communities. People become familiar with a brand, its products and what it has to give.
?If done correctly, making use of these Social media tools can get individuals engaged with a company. Cus?tomers will provide view on products as they come out. They will in addition be more likely to pay for those new products. If they are big enthusiasts of a company and its products, then they will become spokespeople for that company and its products.
?An essential aspect of utilizing these techniques is engaging in on-line forums, writing blogs persistently and posting status updates. It is key to grasp that these campaigns require ongoing work. Keeping a website and profiles on each of these kinds of social media platforms is not just enough. There should be consistent updates and continual participation in discussions.
Social media site are really a great help to the business. Because of, it’s very easy to know socials our updates without doing much effort.
You have a really great site and establishment online Lisa. I commend you for helping others with their online business efforts. Now I know when I need an answer to a ?’n about making money online, you’re the one to come to!
I think its important you have a planned social media strategy so that it does not consume you. It takes discipline to use it for marketing and not letting it monopolize your time.
Social Media is the most useful and inexpensive way for online business owners to capitalize on free search engine traffic, establish a positive presence online, and make money at the same time. In addition, multi-tasking on social networks can be useful, or distracting. It all depends on if you are completely working for yourself, or , for someone else, and they think it might be distracting you from being additionally productive on the job.
I am new to social media world have been using facebook and twitter for a while but I still somehow feel most of the traffic comes from google search engine.
SSA
Wow Lisa,
I never heard of the term for renting a forum. Pretty much, I just sign-up for a bunch of forums, and post my signatures in each of them, adding useful and informative answers, posts, and so forth, so that i could get the white hat SEO backlink effect back to my site. Lisa, you’ve done a fantastic job with building this site and the forum. I’m going to join now, and hope to learn more from you in the near future. So proud of you! (smile)
Shawn
This article is right on target and something I have pondered many times. The eternal question that I ask myself EVERY DAY is: What is the best and most productive use of my time at this moment?
Lisa i agree with you. Thank you so much for sharing such a nice article.
Thank you, Lisa, it’s great to know that my conclusions are shared by an SEO expert =)
One more thought =) What I have said does not mean that social media cannot be efficiently used to market your products and services via Twitter or Facebook. As a prove we can site many analytic articles that predict that Facebook’s ad revenues with audience not intending to buy, will soon exceed Google’s targeted and “requested” ads. This is because most of modern advertisement works exactly this way: telling people to buy something when they actually don’t intend to do that. In this sense, Facebook works better than say, Twitter, as you can create a group with members selected according to demographic and psychographic criteria, make activity there and constant updates.
At the time being, working solely via search engines is more effective as it gives you more instant feedback on your efforts. But in the long run, though you have to put more efforts in your social media campaign, it might bring you larger client base as it will contain also those who did not have preliminary interest in your service or products.
Chrsitina, I completely agree and this lines up with my experiences online thru search engines and social media.
The difference in promoting your business via search engines and social media is, people who enter keywords in search engines, know what they want, and if your site corresponds to their keywords, they are “target traffic”. That is, you don’t have to ask them to read your articles or buy your services, as they are already interested in the type of content they’re here for. If they are just for reading, they will read your content, if they mean to buy, they will compare your offer to others and most likely will get back to you.
In social network, so far I have noticed two categories of users: the ones that just want to connect with their friends or think-alikes, and the ones that promote their business via these media. Both are not your target audience. They are not there to check your site or buy your products.
Now, you have to convince the first category, that they need your site, or service, etc., and that’s a lot of work to do, as these people had no intention and no interest in your business in the first place. The second group, the promoters, are of no use to us, as they are, just like us, work in social media just to find buyers or audience, they are less likely to buy something from us. In my Twitter account, the most of my followers are representatives of the second group of users. If I want “real people” in my account, I have to work hard, and yes, perhaps with all energy I put in there, perhaps they will pop on my site, but there’s no guarantee that they will commit with a purchase.
Therefore I think, since search engines give you much more targeted traffic, it will take you less energy to concentrate on this medium and get results.
Consistency and Discipline are key to any business and activity for sure. Thank you Lisa.
It does not have to be an OFFER per say, but a unique experience with a brand that people would be crazy about to share e,g customer support or solution to a major problem.
Hi Lisa,
I had an excellent experience with social media back in 2006, i used to run an online file storage service and literally in just one day the service exploded due to Digg.com, we got over 1000 diggs in just few hours and over 6,000 new users in 48 hours. However, this was a for a reason, the OFFER, at that time we were one of the first to provide 1GB free file storage, so it was fairly easy for the news to spread. Now it is much harder because such an offer is not unique. So, i believe someone can achieve some good results from social media, drive traffic and build loyal fans BUT in order for the word to spread around and create significant buzz you need to offer something really unique. You need to go beyond your limits, do an offer hard to miss and be sure the news will spread like a virus.
My 2cents
Elias
Absolutely Elias! I agree. Value always wins. I have nothing against social media and think it can be great, I just don’t think most people use it properly. Throwing up random links to pages and offers all day is not a strategy but offering a valuable, relevant freebie or useful information always gets a thumbs up in my book. Before you even venture into marketing, you should have something of value to offer. It definitely starts there. If you don’t have anything of value, your plan is already failing.
Lisa, it’s interesting to see some of the commenters that shun social media. Because for me commenting on blogs, is just as social as Facebook or Twitter. In some ways blog commenting can be more powerful if you comment on the right blogs – especially the ones with CommentLuv and high page rank – like yours 🙂
I must admit I enjoy most aspects of social media (mostly Twitter) and that includes blogging and blog commenting.
Hi Ileane, I can’t speak for everyone but I think the shunning comes because of all the hype and time spent using social media versus how effective is it really for your business? I still believe social media can be effective, but how many people can honestly claim it has actually helped them earn more money? I’m not talking about just bringing in comments and visitors. I personally think social media can be a fabulous place to promote a business but many people abuse it or don’t know how to use it effectively. Same with commenting, etc. At the end of the day, no matter what you use for promotion, how effective are your marketing strategies? Are you tracking the bottom line? Is your income growing, etc? That’s the true test of how effective something is (if making money is your goal.)
for someone who doesn’t know what they are doing, it is distracting, very distracting. for those that know, it is heaven. you are right in the sense that you need a strategy (plan) and the “know how” to leverage its benefits. the best solution IMO however is to pick a handful of marketing solutions, no matter what they are, determine whether they fit your business model (compliment) and focus on those rather than spreading yourself thin and shooting in all kinds of directions.
Fabulous advice, Sunil.
It’s sad when I see people get caught up in the social media, it only takes away from the real seo they should be doing. More people think today that social media is the place to grow their business..but that’s an debatable question.
“TrafficColeman “Signing Off”
Yes,The social ,media can help us do many thing, We should make full use of it.http://www.handpaintportrait.com/
Lisa, I would have to agree with Seth Godin on this one, social media is big distraction and Twitter is a waste of time. Instead of twitting go and do Art, write a great post or start writing your next e-book. Only few people use social media effectively,
Marios
My problem and question with social media is this. What about when the fad goes away? Three years ago Myspace was so popular that individuals and businesses where using it for their official websites. Myspace is not popular anymore so what happened to all those efforts? To me social media is a fad and a short term dose of medicine. Unless social media is going to replace search engine results, I really need help seeing the point.
It was swamped with flash based adverts which kinda made the whole thing grind to a halt. Facebook seems like a cleaner, faster design, but it seems like most social media sites eventually sucumb to something or other
I would like to get real ideas about Google Adsense income and i need to purchase a readymade website. Do you have anything?
I’m no expert as concerns social media, but i intend using social media marketing strategies to promote my blog. I know many who’ve evolved greatly through social media techniques.
Discipline! Working with the social media channels takes discipline and an action plan so that you don’t get sucked into wasting countless hours hanging out with no results. I think that an action plan that includes building the website as your flagship message with the other channels used as supporting that effort. I use Twitter and Facebook to be engaging but I am trying to get better and keeping my marketing plan centered around the website so that it can be profitable.
Social medias take away most of the time that you can give to business.
I think only few people make success out of social media sites..
I have wasted over 60 hours last month in Facebook alone..
FB & Twitter are great for getting your posts out there on the Internet, but some people really misuse them!
I think if you can keep yourself from playing the games on FaceBook, you’ll be doing ok 🙂
Farmville alone has shut the proverbial door on many businesses! Bet those people wish they could make money sharing carrots and celery with all of their farming buddies!
This cracked me up! Mainly because I think of all my family and friends who are hooked on Farmville. I always tell “If you spend the same amount of time on a website, you’d be rich!” 🙂
I agree! social media sites really give and beneficial to online marketers but not as always. It depends on how to use it also. As I observe, many were always looking into quantities of fans on their social media fan pages but no use at all if they will not buy your product right? So there is this site that really helped me a lot also on my online business and I’m great that someone introduce me to this social media site! You should try also to help you on your business.
This is good info, but social media so far has given me nothing but followers not necessary buyers. But I am waiting.
My website really took off last Christmas when I signed up for Facebook and learned how to use it. I post regularly but am not going out looking for followers. It is sort of this funny thing though and it is hit or miss who reads or visits my wall and reads the posts let alone visits the links I share to my website. I still can’t believe it does work because of that.
I have about 1400 followers and once I asked people to click like if they are reading this and only about 100 did. That is why you have to keep posting.
I could also have my fan page set up better but the goal is to get their real email and add them to a mailing list so I can send stuff to them directly.
No you don’t have to be a master of Social Media to be successful on the net. I think it does waste a lot of time. Social Media means you should be social with your friends on it. Let’s say you build a good site with high quality info. Then people who use social media will distribute your content without you having to promote yourself on different websites.
I use twitter and facebook, but I still by and large get most of my traffic from search engines. I do however find that social media is a great way to keep followers engaged. Not everyone wants to sign up for a newsletter and these social media tools are another way to keep these people who LIKE your site to keep coming back. Also it is a way to get traffic to new pages before the search engine pick them up.
Very great point, Jane. For me, I like to see social media as an alternate way to keep people engaged. Very great point!
Hey Jane and Lisa, I absolutely agree with you both, this is based what I’ve experienced with social media, I’ve been using social media and really engaged for more than a year,but it’s never been the major source of traffic, social media is like a external communication channel to a website that strengthen the relationship with its readers. Social media makes connection easier, just like people reply twitter dm even faster than email, make appointment through facebook instead of phone call, a website cannot live without social media nowadays because relationship with readers does matter. 🙂
I’m no social media expert, but I believe my website may have been dead without social media. Other methods of marketing and promoting one’s website is still necessary, but in my experience, social media is king.
Social Media, guess I am not social enough to be part of it, sure when I do a blog post I Tweet and Digg it, rarely do I share on Facebook.
My Blogging and making money on the internet is a more than a hobby but not my full time income. So my time is better spent writing the content, rather than being sociable.
This is really a great question, Lisa.
Social Media can play a great roll in helping you to gain exposure, traffic, and help to build your brand as well. But if you are not careful you can be led astray depending on what you do on that particular social media site.
Well said Lisa! I particularly agree with your question on what makes a social media expert an expert. From my observation, experts & gurus are largely self-appointed.
My use of the social networks is quite similar to yours – and I’m always conscious that it can be a huge time stealer if I let it. I probably use a clearer plan for my clients than for my own business 😉
I don’t believe anyone with a website today can afford not to use social media as part of their overall online marketing strategy.
I expect the social networking scene will evolve much more rapidly than the search engines. I’m not taking much stock in facebook and twitter, even though I use their buttons. My blog is seriously humorous, and my regular site is humorously serious. My personae are not consistent enough to keep a following with a social network. I provide my services (laughter and self-help) to people who are searching. I’m building sites that try to reach those folks.
I think I hold similar thoughts about social media. This type of communication can be very powerful, but requires a lot of commitment just as any other communication channel. And this is where I see executives misunderstand the commitment needed.
Example: I just spoke with a CEO of an upcoming pharmaceutical. He’s developing a direct-to-consumer marketing strategy. He’s totally winning to get TV commercials with celebrities, but would hesitate if I said to drop 50K on a 6 month social media strategy….and in my opinion, chances of contacting and establishing relationships with valid customers is greater.
I just started blogging seriously, and so my focus is going to be on SEO and introducing myself in related blogs.
Michael,
I couldn’t agree which you more about committing yourself wholeheartedly to making the best of social media work for you. To be honest, leveraging social media to your fullest positive advantage is a full-time job and then some. Don’t focus too much when it comes to search engine optimization on keyword density and trying to rank for specific keyword, search term phrase, and always hoping to be on page one of Google. The main focus should be on creating unique, informative, compelling and engaging blog content, so that even if you don’t rank on page 1 in Google for every new blog post you publish, it’ll still be building quality traffic for years to come from your informative blog posts. Last but not least, building online meaningful relationships with your readers will do more good than always hoping to be on page 1 of Google for any search term or specific keyword. With that said, I wish you to best in your on line publishing and blogging endeavors.