Welcome to issue 4 of more content = more cash. Last week we introduced you to the in depth world of multimedia and what you need to create a social media fire. This week its time to look into starting the fire and how to crate your social media accounts and setting them up for your campaign. WLD really hope that these blog posts are coming in handy for you and are helping you to build up your SEO.
Issue 4: Starting Your Social Media Fire
In this issue, we look at setting up the various social media channels to make best use of them. I’ll be referring to a case study that will help you understand the effects in context. This case study recently won an NMA award for ‘best use of social media’ and involves a certain ‘Meerkat‘. If you haven’t guessed it, it’s the ‘Compare the Meerkat‘ campaign run by ‘CompareTheMarket.com’ (CTM.com).
Before I start, I just want to make a point of ‘He Who Dares Wins’. Imagine the faces of some who first heard the idea ‘I know, let’s do a pun with meerkats?’. Ideas can sound very bizarre but it’s the bizarre ideas that capture the public so be brave with them!
What’s it good for? Well, apart from allowing you to shame your friends by tagging photos, it is a colossal community of people connected in a number of ways. It is a place to share interests, to talk about what you’re doing, to join groups or notify others of an event. The core of facebook is both the established community and the tools it has for users to generate content. Facebook will help you build a fan base who you can send messages and be a great discussion forum around your campaign. Take a look at Aleksandr Orlov’s page (the name of the meerkat!)
Facebook allows you to create a number of interactive features within the page including discussion boards, photo gallery’s, video clips, fan lists and even custom features via the Facebook API and markup language (FBML). It is generally a great hub for a campaign allow you to send messages and announcements to all the fans you work hard to collect.
Flickr
What’s it good for? Flickr is a great community based around the love for photos, art and generally anything visually appealing. There are a few large image aggregate sites but none with the community and fluidity of Flickr.
CTM.com’s Flickr page is a collection of meerkat imagery which makes sense! A moderator for the page has conducted searches around Flickr and requested for other users to add their photos to the group, thus building its importance. You’ll notice a link back to their site ‘comparethemarket.com’ which not only helps drive direct referral traffic but increases the site’s SEO benefit.
Twitter
Twitter is a micro-blogging phenomenon. Micro-blogging is simply a blog on a tiny scale. A ‘tweet’ is a name given to an update cast via twitter. Twitter is great for building a character or a business profile but like a blog, needs an interesting or amusing topic to become popular. Twitter popularity is based on the amount of ‘followers’ you have who are other users with twitter accounts who have subscribed to listen to your ‘tweets’. Twitter is a great place to build a profile for your campaign and attract a following. You can route this traffic back to your brand and site by posting links within your tweets. If you haven’t already check out twitter. You can even follow WhiteLabelDating.com on there, ‘wld‘.
CTM.com use twitter really well with a profile of their meerkat ‘Aleksandr’ which has, at last count, 17,718 followers! That’s 17,718 people who are tuned in to whatever he chooses to broadcast. Could be new product offerings or special offerings. You start to get the idea that a good marketing campaign can leave a long lingering tail of free broadcasting.
Content Aggregators
(Digg.com, Delicious.com, Reddit.com, StumbleUpon.com…)
Content aggregate sites like the above mentioned work hard for you if the content is well received. All you need to do is make it easy for your users to add your content to these sites (mentioned in the previous article). A good example of this is on the BBC site (http://www.bbc.co.uk). If you read any article, you’ll see the various options at the bottom to submit the content to a social network site. As you produce your content, make sure you make use of these in the same way.
That’s it for this week, hope you found the tips useful. Next week we’ll be looking at sustaining the viral reaction created by your campaigns and stoking the fire further…
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