Social Media Strategy Guide

Social Media Strategy Guide by Kunal Agarwal

Creating Accounts

Register and create profiles at each of the following sites. If possible try to keep the same user name across all of the sites so people become familiar with your profiles across all sites.

Digg.com
Del.icio.us
StumbleUpon.com (requires toolbar installation)
Propeller.com
Mixx.com
Reddit.com
Topix.com
BlogCarnival.com
Technorati.com
YouTube

Account Development

Not all social media users are created equal. On many sites the top users have many friends and the content they submit has a much better chance of becoming popular than content submitted by the average user.

There are a few primary ways to build a powerful account.

Fill out your profile completely. Add a photo if applicable and include information about your interests and hobbies so that other users can get a feel for who you are.
Vote and comment on content that other users have submitted. Social media sites are communities, so the only way to gain influence within the community is to interact with other members. Browse the popular and upcoming pages of sites like Digg and vote for stories you like. If you have an opinion, leave a comment, the more entertaining the better. The more other users see your activity on the site, the better chances they will add you as a friend.
Add other users as friends, lots of them. Try to pick out users that like to read and submit content that is relevant to your site.
Submit your own content and promote it within the site to help it become popular. This will be covered in more detail in the next section.






Content Submission and Promotion

The end goal of all this social media business is to submit content from your site, help it become popular, and drive traffic to the site. But submitting content only from your site for promotional reasons won’t work. In fact it can be harmful.

The community generally reviles users that only submit content for promotional reasons. It’s considered a form of SPAM and can even result in account banning if it’s extremely blatant.

To make this work, you’ll need to become true members of the community – submitting comment from many different sites and helping it become popular. This lays the groundwork for the future promotion of your site’s content.

How to Find and Submit Popular Content

The easiest way to submit an article and have it become popular is to submit content from a site that already has a large social media following. This works because these sites have many many readers who always vote for them, so even content submitted by a weak account is guaranteed to get votes. The downside is that other users race to be the first to submit this content so you have to be fast.

Another great way to find content that has the potential to become popular is by cross submitting from one social site to the next. For example, an article that is close to becoming popular on Digg can be submitted to StumbleUpon and vice versa. Once we get into using these sites I will show you how to find good stories for cross submission.

Commenting on Blogs and Forums

Another way to drive traffic and create awareness for your site around the web is commenting on blogs and forums. Most of these sites allow commenters to leave a link (either in their name or in a signature) back to a site of their choice.

Although these links rarely send massive traffic, they do send visitors that are extremely well targeted. They are also great for getting the attention of bloggers and webmasters who are influential web users.

The key to good commenting is posting interesting remarks that are related to the article or forum thread. If you leave a meaningless comment with 3 links in it that are totally irrelevant, it will probably be deleted as SPAM. But if you contribute to the discussion, its likely people will follow the link back your site to check it out.