Social Media Optimization: Optimize Your Social Media Marketing

If you're not familiar with my last post, Social Media Marketing: Are You Wasting Your Time?, do read it before going on.

In it I discuss the issue of social media marketing and how if not channelled correctly can cost you valuable time from your work day. Are you prone to trying out the next new social site without having any goals or aims in sight?

If you are, then you need to consider how much time you're putting into Social Media Marketing (SMM) and what you're getting out. If your ROI is small then you need to optimize your SMM.

"The best thing I ever did was shut off my Digg account. I gained a few hours a week and after 6 months have never noticed any negative impact on my site or my business."
Arnie Vertical Measures.

This comment on my last post from Arnie goes to prove that the Digg audience wasn't the correct one for his business but that doesn't mean to say that SMM is a waste of time.

What Social Media Platforms Are Out There

Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, Sphinn, Delicious, Reddit, Propeller, Facebook, YouTube, Linked In, Xing, Forums, the list goes on.

Social Media Optimization (SMM)

Now you might look at the list above and say "I've got an account with every one of those sites!" which is fine. Although at the moment by the time you've logged into each one and Stumbled or Sphunn a post it's already lunchtime and you've not done any paying work!

At this point you need to optimize your SMM and look at ways to get the most out of the little time you have day-to-day. You need to focus your time on specific targets, that's unless you live and breathe social media like Mohammed Saleem :)

Before diving into each social site do some research into the stories or sites that do well and monitor how people market themselves. Each site has differing advantages and disadvantages for each market and submitting to all is like dropping a pebble into the ocean, you'll have a very small effect.

To create a large ripple you'll need to create quality content and target those sites specific to your market.

Personas

To make the most out of your time you need to target a group or groups of people and spend time researching who these people are and what makes them tick. I'm a big fan of personas and detailing exactly who you're aiming your marketing at, not just for your website but your SMM. Rand over at SEOmoz does a great job of explaining marketing personas with the help of Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive.

Creating marketing personas is nothing new but can cut through the haze and better segment your audience to help you fish for customers with a large net, as opposed to one single hook.

Ed Roach at Brand Corral also has a great post 20 Questions To THE Perfect Customer! which further clarifies your target audience.

Analyse your Site Statistics

To further aid you in identifying what social sites work best for you and your business make sure you look through your website statistics. If you own a blog Mybloglog has it's own statistics package built in which can tell you what is being read and where those people found your content.

Use your analytics package to determine whether you're getting a good ROI of your time.

It's nice to get a peak in traffic to your site but what you really want is continued visitors and growth. Your analytics can help you optimize your marketing and tell you where most of your traffic is coming from. Use it and save yourself time.

Push To The Max

Now that you know some of the social media platforms and who you are targeting you can now go on to combine both sets of information to optimize your SMM.

Pick your audience and push to the max.

Goal setting is one part of the mix you need to get right before socialising, without goals you'll end up with a Digg account like Arnie's that just burns your time away with nothing to show for it.

Do you want more subscribers to your blog, for them to read specific posts or link your name with a service. Or do you want someone to read your blog post, look through your site and then contact you? With aims in place you can easily measure how effective your marketing is.

Muhammad Saleem’s recent talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco has some great details about Social Media Optimization comprehensive write up by Lee Odden at the Top Rank Blog and is well worth a read.

Linked In has improved greatly over the last 6 months with the Answers section providing a great place to socialise with members and make new contacts. I've found Linked In to be well worth the investment of time to keep updated and on top of.

Stumbleupon has proved successful for myself across a broad range of topics but one in particular stood out more than most. SU is full of great content but I nearly fell into the old time wasting trap recently when viewing someone's page due to the new grid layout, it's great but damn it's distracting!

Personally I think Twitter is a great tool to get your message out quickly and once out there feedback is instant. I often read blog posts by my twitter friends ahead of ones that are sitting in my feed reader. John Cow recently wrote a interesting post about Twitter vs RSS and how it beats RSS on so many levels.

I hope this stops some people stressing about keeping up with the Jones in the social media world. Once you've optimized your SMM then you can think about how to combine it with your SEO and PPC, but that's for another post :)