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The Mystery Behind Social News Websites |
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Written by Nicholas Cifuentes
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Thursday, 07 February 2008 |
It seems social media marketing still seems mysterious to many who are trying to take on the challenge. Viral video, blogging, reputation management, forums, wiki’s, and more; what’s the point you ask? It’s a common question with some very ‘uncommon’ answers. Any online marketer today will tell you it's important, but for many online marketers—they just are not sure how and what to do.
Rather than talk about all these in general, let’s talk about a first step for any online marketing person – social news websites.
This powerful catalyst for viral marketing is an excellent method for attracting attention, traffic and links. It gives you a platform to highlight your content and website to a large audience.
In social news sites, communities are established where users can submit news stories, articles and media – to share them with other people in the community. Based on the relevance of your submission and the audience interested in such – you can take a small seed and grow it extremely fast if you have the right nurturing factor.
Users in the community, in the end, are what will decide your submission and where it goes. But if you do it right, and use the social news websites to your advantage – you can become an instant success.
Most of these websites are based upon a democratic method – where social voting takes place to rank a story and where it appears on a website. Some of the websites do rely on human editors and sometimes they will determine the visibility of your piece and where it goes. It really just depends where you go and how you play the cards.
Social news websites are divided into broadly focused groups and more minimized communities. Some only cater to certain niches, and others cover everything humanly possible. Digg is the most popular of the social news websites and most well known. With a strong community behind it – Digg covers all the news verticals.
Other wide-focusing social news websites include Mixx, Reddit, and Propeller. More narrowly focused websites include Sphinn (Internet Marketing) and Showhype (Entertainment).
Choosing a social community to start with and is worth your time; is the best way to start your search. You want to choose a community that will work for you, and has a consistent following – as opposed to the many social news websites that don’t garner enough traffic to bother with.
You have to ask yourself some questions:
- What is the frequency of submissions?
- What is the date of the stories on the front page?
- How many members are there and how active are they?
- Are there comments for each story?
- How many votes does it take to land you on the front page?
Most marketers will have a hard time deciding what is the best how they should go about it – so it helps to consult a social media marketer to work with your content and work to see a response.
One of the best things to do to start is to follow a social news website regularly. Understating the user community and how it works and what type of stories are disseminated often, will help you decide where to go. At the same time, you will be involved in the process and be able to take part in the community – outside of marketing your product.
Some things to do:
Determine the influencers: Befriend these people; they will guide you where you need to go and help you understand how the community works.
Become a regular user: You have to understand the community and how it works – it’s pointless to go there once a month; you have to take part regularly to understand the processes and how the community acts and disseminates information. Aim to submit three stories a day and comment on at least five other stories – it seems trivial, but will help you in the long run in establishing yourself among the community.
Connect with users: Interact with users and befriend them. It helps grow your reputation and develop a positive reputation with the community.
Tell your friends: Evangelize the community to your peers. Work to get your friends to sign up or people you work with. Also, consider writing about it in your blog or social community, and put up buttons that can encourage people to use the social news websites.
Getting to the Front of the Line?
Getting to the front page is the obvious goal with social news websites. Planting your material and having it stick to the homepage of the social news websites is the entire purpose of this process.
- Become an Influencer: Becoming a regular participant party on these website is the first step. You need to develop a good reputation with the users and create a network of friends, fans, and supporters of your profile. You need to become a user who submits HIGH QUALITY content that is relevant to your purpose and the community’s interest. This will take time, but eventually it increases the possibility of you showing up on the front page of the social news websites.
- Find the influencers: You want to pitch your material to the ones who matter. You have to befriend active social media users and get them to submit content from your website. This involves selling yourself and making sure your content is 100% relevant to their liking and the social news website.
- Develop a voting network: This is what everyone is trying to do: recruit your friends, family, colleagues to registers on the social media communities and vote each other stories up. This works to a point – but remember this, some social community websites will see the same voters consistently voting up stories by the same users, and that can be seen as mass manipulation of stories and ultimately you could be banned or penalized for doing so. This is similar to ‘spamming links’ when trying to link build your website…same rules follow – so be wary of overdoing it!
How Do I Get Started?
Build a profile up and establish yourself in the user community, as opposed to a voting network. Becoming a regular participant and pitching influencers will help build your persona and brand up respectively, and ultimately place you where you need to be in the ranks.
Remember, this isn’t an overnight phenomenon. It takes time to establish this – become a regular user and get moving!
In the next article, we will discuss what social news websites are effective and will work for what you need them to do. |
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