This is post two of a three part series. Article one covered Part 1: An Introduction to Social Media Marketing. This article will cover Part 2: Three Types of Social Media and What to Publish.
Three types of social media
There are three main types of social media: publishing, sharing and networking. Each social media service should fall into at least one of these categories. There will be some overlap, and services like Facebook can fall right in the middle.
What should I publish?
Publish everything you have, anywhere you can. Paul Lavenhar of PL Communications says:
Today, HubSpot featured a very informative webinar covering the relationship between Social Media and Business Marketing. I found that the webinar cleared up many of the questions I had about social media. I would like to share some of what I learned. This is post one of a three part series. This article will cover Part 1: An Introduction to Social Media Marketing.
Why is social media important?
Traditionally, we have practiced many forms of outbound marketing—we attempt to pull people in toward us. We have tried seminars, trade show booths, telemarketing, print ads, direct mail, email blasts, television commercials and radio ads. Sometimes successful, these types of marketing are expensive and are very easy to block out. We have Do-Not-Call lists, our DVRs can skip TV commercials and we even have handy ways to assassinate spam.
HubSpot recently published an article on their blog about the next big social news site called Mixx. Mixx claims to be ‘Your Blend of the Web’, and I feel that it delivers—quite well.
Signing up for Mixx is a short and painless process. Enter a few of your favorite tags and categories and viola…you have a completely custom front page! Much more targeted than using Digg’s (very dry) category system.
I customized my front page to display Web Design, SEO, PHP and Ruby on Rails articles. So far I have been very happy with the news I am seeing, and have even learned about a new service called Tweetburner, but that’s a topic for another post.
Aaron Wall of SEOBook has released a new SEO tool called Rank Checker. This tool allows you to easily track your rankings and rank changes on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search (MSN).
This free tool is packaged as a Firefox extension, making it quite reliable. You can manually check rankings for a list of keywords, and can even setup scheduled tasks to automatically fetch rankings at specified times and intervals.
This tool saves me a lot of time since I used to do this task manually. Digital Point provides a similar tool accessed through a web interface. However, it does not provide data from Google unless you own a now discontinued Google SOAP API Key.
This morning I stumbled upon YouTube’s April Fool’s Joke. Every featured Video on the YouTube home page links directly to the music video for Rick Astley – Never Gonna Give You Up. I did not realize it at first, and I found myself watching the video thinking, “Did I actually click on this?”
It turns out that the video, which was a number one hit in the late 80’s, is an infamous internet meme called a Rickroll.
A Rickroll is where an internet prankster posts a link in a discussion, claiming that the link contains content related to the discussion. When the user clicks on the link, they are taken to the Rick Astley video. They have just been Rickrolled.
