With so many conversations these days targeting importance of doing social marketing to promote your blog on sites like Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed I feel I have to talk about…
Importance Of Planning For Social Networks Failure
Image by emiemar via Flickr
In fact I think I should say INEVITABLE failure! And no, it doesn’t necessary mean that the site will go down but rather a more simple variation of failure – it will fail to deliver the results you are used to seeing right now and if you don’t variate your promotional efforts – it will drug down your blog with it!
Social Marketing Works…
It will deliver great results if done properly and responcible probably for about 40% if not more of the entire traffic I get to my own blog. And I’m not even overly active on the social web.
Social Marketing is one of your best friends and should not be ignored! But it should also not be a single source of the traffic!
And here is why:
- Social Marketing requires constant active participation in order to deliver the results worth talking about. Yes, it is great for delivering instant gratification and send waves of the traffic even to a brand new blog, get it indexed faster and boost its authority – but in order to do so, it requires that you have active profile on social networks. And by active I mean interactive profile, where you hold 2 way conversation, engage people and not just push your own message and agenda. Can be very time consuming!
- Social Web is constantly changes and you have to constantly adopt in order to get best results from social marketing. Everybody wants to be the Next Facebook or Next Tweeter and people constantly look for a new interaction. You have to follow the lead and establish commanding presence at each new site, in order to benefit, even if it is destined to fail a year from now.
- Social Web is unpredictable. I always compare traffic I get from my social marketing to throwing a stone into a water – I know it will generate the wave if properly done but can’t predict with 100% certainty that those waves will actually reach my blog as I expect or turn into a destructive tsunami forcing you to defend your reputation. Social Marketing is a skill only a few truly posses and many pretend to – I’m one of those who openly admit my naivete in that area, although I manage to hold my own, although don’t ask me to explain how!
I can probably provide even more examples but I hope you get the point!
Don’t Rely On Any Single Source for Your Blog Traffic
Diversify Your Traffic Strategies
As I have already mentioned – social web works and you must take advantage of what it has to offer! But you should also never ignore the basics that never stopped working:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Blog to Blog Marketing (commenting, guest posting)
- Forum Marketing
- Article Marketing
- Video Marketing
Add at least those listed above and you simply can fail when the social web fails. And if you need a great service to automate those efforts – I can recommend one provided by Willie Crawford – Push Button Traffic
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thats true social networking always changes, i had some experience some time ago when my partners talked about facebook as if it were tv, i said, facebook is just not worth the money, now my nephews business is growing faster than mine thanks to facebook.
.-= Sarah O.´s last blog ..Ayudale a Cupido =-.
Sarah,
I know many people who benefit immensely from Social Networks – point here is – don’t rely on them alone!
Hi my name is Carlota and i think that you are right. In fact i have spend more than one year looking for a job and then i decided open my owne network, it is called besoos.com. It was a great idea to do something like that, and now i am my own boss.