Social Media Marketing – Oops! I found you

If I were to close my eyes and think about social media marketing right now and try to conjure up an image of what social media marketing would be like IF I were a human being, I think it would be someone like this: someone who runs for their life every time they come across another human species that is unclickable, undeletable, and if this other human species is talking, instead of writing, life is over. C’est fini.

As with many other search engine specialists on this planet, we’re really trying to think outside the box here. Are the days of search engine optimization really over now that social media marketing is ALMOST EVERYTHING? Will Google finally quit because you can’t chat, poke, super-tap, comment, bite, punch, or play mob wars with Google?

The ‘Whoa, I Found You’ Method of Social Media Marketing

Well, it’s not actually called the ‘oops’ method, it’s just that I find it ironic and a very relevant description of social media marketing and link building. With social media marketing becoming so intensely popular due to the plummeting economy, I’d like to take some time to write about what I think of some of the link building social networking sites we have today. They are underutilized, you see. Well, in my part of the world it is, anyway.

In this article, I’ll leave Facebook out of the picture. Instead, I’d like to move to the smaller but no less efficient micro social media marketing sites like delicious, digg, stumbleupon, furl, twitter, propeller and Yahoo!’s new baby Buzz.

In reality, this is just a small part of social media marketing and some people more specifically refer to it as social bookmarking because that’s exactly what it is! You bookmark things you like (or brag about your own articles there) and share them with the network of people you have on that minisite. Bright. Just like Facebook, but on a smaller scale.

Delicious is one of the original sites like this and at the time, I didn’t even know it was part of the social media marketing compound; I just kept checking everything I wanted there and started to see some changes. yahoo! saw the potential and bought delicious a few years ago and is STILL the number one social bookmarking site we have on the internet today. It’s seamless and absolutely hassle-free. According to some, there are over three million people using this social media marketing website and over a hundred million links tagged there!

Browser toolbar download “instant tag”

If a social media marketing website does NOT have that one-click feature for you to download in your browser, forget it… no one else is going to bother with that and you’ll be wasting your time there.

Download it and whenever you see something of interest, click the button and you will automatically add that link, along with your comments, to your profile.

Like all other social media marketing websites, it helps to have a few friends in your network. I’m talking beyond just delicious here. Whether it’s your Facebook, Twitter, digg, furl, buzz or whatever, the result is much higher when you have friends there.

Oopsie, I stumbled upon your website or article.

With a little twist on social media marketing, we have something called stumbling that… well, it’s self-explanatory. It helps you stumble upon websites, videos, images, web content, or downloadable stuff when you’re bored (or trying to pretend to work while your boss goes on break).

If you’ve downloaded the stumbleupon toolbar, click an icon (they’re neatly categorized into each of their own categories) and you’ve stumbled upon a site or blogs that might be of interest to you. Lots of people find interesting stories to read or things to learn through stumbleupon.

So how do you use this new social media marketing thing?

This ties in brilliantly with things you post online…an article, a YouTube video, a blog post ranting about the army of ants you just killed in the kitchen or your broken fingernail…you mark them, you post them on these sites.

If you think article merchandising will make you the next Donald Trump, you’ve got another tank coming your way! This is what you do…

You write the article, post it to one of your favorite article directories, go to your published article, brand, and link each and every one of them to those social media marketing websites.

Spend a little time checking out the other stuff posted there, mix it up a bit and add people to your network. Do this consistently for a couple of months THEN you will see a difference.