We are really excited that Sujan Patel of Docshop has agreed to be the interviewed in our social media optimization series.
Sujan Patel is responsible for driving organic and social media traffic to Docshop, a health information portal.
Getting web sites to link to anything health related can be an extremely difficult task, but Sujan has managed to add over 38,000 links this year!
We are very excited that he agreed to share his views and experience about what he finds works and doesn’t work in social media.
1. Can you give me a little bit of background on Docshop ? When was it launched and what are the goals of the site?
Docshop was launched in the late 90s as a way to connect patients with doctors. Docshop’s focus is on elective health care for such procedures as lasik, cosmetic surgery, dentistry, bariatrics, and fertility. The site is a place where people can find doctors near them using our directory as well as learn more about the procedures. We have over thousand pages on educating patients on different hundreds of different procedures.
2. What is your title and role at Docshop.com?
My role at the company is an “SEO Analyst” Where I spend most of my time researching and developing new strategies that can work for Docshop. I introduced social media marketing to Docshop as a way to drive a huge amount of traffic to the site and they absolutely loved it. We now get three to five thousand new visitors each week.
3. Docshop.com is at the forefront of social media marketing. What social media tools or tactics are you using? What works?
I believe that the title and description of the post is the most important part of social media marketing. A catchy title and a appealing description can get you natural votes and tons of traffic. I don’t use any tools but I have several tactics that I can share.
- When I do social media marketing for any site I do extensive testing and tracking. Each site is different and will have very different results. testing and tracking is quite simple: Keep a written record of everything you do. If post a particular type of post Monday morning and it drives you 3000 visitors and you do the same type of post Tuesday night but it only drives 300 visitors. This helps you isolate the problem. So keep a written record of every story and the success and even failure.
- Find the right social media sites. Be sure you find the right sites for you niche, and you can only do so by doing extensive testing.
- This the most important one: Participate in the community. Whatever sites you find you must participate. This means not only submitting your sites articles it means submitting all types or articles. Vote on other stories that are of interested to you. Make comments(useful comments). Doing this before you start your SMM campaign and you will increase your changes of making the front page.
As far as what works, it depends on what niche. Follow the rules of the community and test some boundaries (be prepared to face the consequences if you do this) and you figure out what’s works.
4. What are some of the opportunities in social media that you see that marketers are not taking advantage of?
Niche sites. Digg, and Stumble Upon are very good sites and can drive a lot of traffic but smaller niche sites can drive good traffic that is more likely to come back to your site. This is something I haven’t seen many marketers take advantage of. Lets say I had a sports websites I would submit to smaller sports based social media sites like Sojjo or http://ballhype.com/ or http://scoreguru.com/.
5. Which SMO techniques do you think are a waste of time?
Submitting garbage and attempting to game the community. Submitting mediocre articles dont work, it works best if you submit only your best articles. And gaming these sites only works for a short time.
6. Tell me about the biggest challenge you face in SMO?
The most challenging part of SMO for me is making the health industry fun and exciting. Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon users are not big fans of health, they are more interested in technology or politics. So coming up with an idea for a article to appeal to that audience while also staying on topic is the hardest part for me.
I had a similar experience with DIGG and Stumble upon. You have to submit your best stuff.