Marketing your blog via social network

1. Marketing your site via social network:
Knowing how to market social networks is an important part of the networking cycle, yet is often overlooked. Good marketing of your networks, whether for business or pleasure, will help drive new traffic and build new communities and the opportunity for viral marketing. This can be essential for the success of your social networking experience. Here are some tips to help market your social network sites:
a. Help People Find You
Make sure that people know how to find you. This is easy to do and is simply a case of making sure you promote your social networking sites whenever the appropriate opportunity arises. For instance, put information about the social networks that you belong to as the footer or in your signature in e-mails. Try to keep these relevant, therefore put business focussed social network information on business-related e-mails unless you really feel that your commercial contacts will be interested in your unique taste of music!
b. Forums and Chat
If you belong to forums and chat groups that allow signatures at the bottom of posts, put your social networking information there. Forums are a great way to meet like-minded individuals, and you will soon find that people see your signature and come to visit you.
Search the Network: By searching the social network that you belong to for family and friends you will soon start to build up and market your site. You can build on these contacts and soon your network will be buzzing.
c. Make It a Fun Place to Visit
If you are a member of a social network site such as MySpace, there are many add ins that you can find that will customize the look of your site. These include countdown clocks, music, animations and a vast number of other widgets and gizmos to add personality to your pages. These can be a great way to share information in a fun way with other people.
d. Work Within the Network
Visit the pages of other members and leave comments and feedback. This is a great way to meet like minded people as they are likely to come to your pages and find out more about you.
e. Guerrilla Marketing
This can entail anything from leaving fliers at gigs to wearing t-shirts with your url on it. Some more aggressive guerrilla marketing techniques can include leaving stickers around streets and offices. Some guerrilla tactics may not be legal and this should be checked before taking part in anything like this.
f. Keep it Fresh
If you have a blog on your social network, make sure that it is regularly updated. A relevant and up-to-date blog will give people a reason to come back and visit your site time after time again.
Social networking can be a rewarding experience and can, quite literally, open up a whole new world of friends and contacts. A well-marketed site will attract visitors from far and wide to come and visit, finding out more about you and your interests.
2. Lessons that I learnt from this assignment: Facebook and Twitter
Facebook and Twitter are edging ever closer and converging with each other. And while that may be the case to a certain extent, they differ on one key issue: addictiveness.
At the end of last week, Facebook opened up some key features of the site to developers. By freeing up its application programming interfaces (APIs) just a tad, it means outside forces can develop and imagine new ways of using Facebook’s user features.
One of these features is the status updates. You know, the section of Facebook where you are asked to fill your friends in on what you are doing, or what is happening in your life. With the opening up of its APIs, these status updates can emigrate outwards to the rest of the social Web.
This has lead to comparisons being made to Twitter, the micro-blogging service which builds its whole appeal on similar (but inherently different) status updates. Clearly, there is some crossover between Facebook and Twitter, and that just goes to show how appealing it is to issue short blog-like posts updating your online friends instantly.
While some convergence of features does seem to be taking place, there are some key differences between Facebook and Twitter. As VentureBeat rightly points out, Facebook and Twitter updates are used in entirely different ways. Twitter is much more conversational and filled with observations on the world. While Facebook status updates tend to stick to a formulaic “I am doing this,” or “I have done this.”
But for me there’s a bigger differentiator between the two social media sites, and that is addictiveness. I usually log in to Facebook two or three times a day. I check to see what my friends have been doing (usually nothing of note), maybe take a quiz, maybe look at a new photo or two, and then log out. There is very little interactivity or involvement, and no conversation to speak of.
Whereas Twitter gets my attention maybe five times a day, and once logged in, I’m much more interested. I’ll do the obvious of updating my status with what I’m up to, but then I’ll scroll for ages reading everyone’s conversation streams and responding where necessary. An hour can go by and I’m still on the site, conversing, reading, and interacting.
It’s this addictive quality that, for me at least, gives Twitter the edge in this field. Facebook is more of an all-encompassing social network, but for day-to-day usage, Twitter takes some beating. Which just shows how specializing at one aspect of a service and doing it well is sometimes more sensible than throwing the kitchen sink into the mix and seeing what sticks.