Article in Social Media

Social marketing has become an important part of building a strong internet presence today. In fact, many people are reporting they are seeing huge results from sites such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and others. Some sites such as Digg can send 10,000 or more visitors in a single day if your blog or web site has a story the masses think is Diggworthy

Much of the time because of the traffic they send, these social sites can bring your site from obscurity to the forefront in a very shot amount of time. Sometimes though, this traffic is short lived and only lasts for a couple of days. But if you look around, it seems like there’s another one of these social networking sites popping up nearly every other day. So what’s important and how should you use these tools to enhance your business and help you out, rather that be a burden and waste your time.

Let’s just face it. You can’t join every single social site on the web even though you get email from your friends on a daily basis encouraging you to join the latest one they just discovered. Anything you join just to be a part of rather than letting it serve some actual purpose for you, is a complete waste of time. Casual cruising of these sites can be fun and entertaining, I mean who doesn’t like to see some geeky kid pull off some incredible guitar solo or watch some psycho kitty bounce around like a superball? The problem arises when you discover you’ve been watching YouTube videos for 2 hours and have wasted the entire morning.

All different kinds of social media such as blogs, forums, Google groups, Facebook, MySpace, micro blogging services such as Twitter and more can steal your time away. At some point you have to decide what services you are going to use and which ones you are going to get rid of or at least, not participate in any longer.

A couple of social media type sites that I’ve been using lately are Twitter and StumbleUpon. I love Twitter because I’m following all the top bloggers and affiliate marketers as well as some of my friends. Twitter makes it incredibly easy to find out exactly what your peers or coworkers are doing and when people link to bizarre stories or their blogs posts that look interesting, I’ll go and check them out, whereas I don’t have to check multiple sources and possibly waste more time than I wanted to.

I’ve also been participating in more forums lately such as Webmaster Talk because that seems to be where the experts are hanging out and offering some unique perspectives they may not be sharing on their blogs or sites. Plus with forums, you can ask very specific questions and get a multitude of answers and threads can sometimes take on a life of their own and end up place you didn’t expect.

One site I do find useful, but has some issues is Facebook. Facebook is very helpful for networking and meeting people, but at some point will have to think about spam filters for silly requests. Some people are complaining they are getting inundated with friend and application requests and what they really want to do with Facebook is being set aside to deal with a pile of these interruptions every day.

You are the one who ultimately has to decide what social networking and media sites work for you. If you find that you spend too much time at Digg or watching YouTube for hours on end then maybe you need to make a contract with yourself to not watch any more than 15 minutes of videos and read only 5 top stories at Digg.

Social marketing can be a huge benefit to your business and if you aren’t careful, it can also be a huge hindrance, keeping you from getting the things done that will put more bread on the table and make your business more successful. Use social media to your advantage and refuse to let it have control over you.