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Everyone is betting on social marketing. Now this is one term which has gone into the blood and thoughts of all Internet marketers. While saying that, we can not also stay away from the social marketing. This is one of the situations where, I think, that we need to follow the crowd. But the biggest challenge is to be a different one, even in the crowd. We need to embrace social marketing. How do we do that? There are so many social sites which are blooming in the Internet, day after day. Now the real question is: Which one of these social marketing sites should I choose? The answer to the above question is that it depends on
- The type of content you are publishing and
- Other demographical considerations.
Let us first discuss the type of content. Some of the blogs and web sites publish news items. And news is spreading at the speed of light with today’s technological advances. One of the biggest reasons for this fast spreading is social the social aspect of a news item. There are people who are interested in some technology or gadget, and they might be a part of a large community which shares the same interest. Say for example, iPhone. There are large number of people who are big fans of iPhone. So whatever news that is coming on iPhone will create some kind of interest in those people. So they will follow the news item and share it with other like minded people.
If you are someone who largely builds your content on news, then you should use a tool that is more relevant to news items. Digg and Propeller are some of the fine examples of social marketing sites, which largely focuses on news items. But if you choose some social marketing tool which is meant for deep drill down technical articles, then you are lost at the first instant. I made that mistake. When I started this blog, I largely focused on Digg as a promoting tool. This was a mistake because my content was not based on news items or some hot trends which people interested liked to follow up. The I changed to Sphinn and later to Stumbleupon. Stumbleupon experiment was a good learning and was a success, because it could provide me people who were interested in the things I blogged.
Now let us consider the demographical aspect. If you are blogging in a language other than English, then you should try some social marketing tool in that language itself. Otherwise, not so many people will go through your post or site. Similarly, you can also leverage on the marketing tools specific for a country. If you are living in United States, then you may find some tools which targets only US population. If you are from a country like India, then you can use tools like IndianPad. This matters since some of your content may be made for people from a certain demography.
Another thing you need to consider is the age of the people you target. Some tools are extensively used by people belonging to some age group. So try to find out the audience of each user group before you invest your time in some tool. Some initial research will take up some more time. But it is worth investing that amount of time. And that is what it makes marketing different from gambling.
