As I was reading through the interview answers recently from Dan and Jennifer I was struck by one of their comments in the response to this question:
Tell me about your most successful social media campaign?
Thankfully we’ve had many successful social media campaigns, so it’s hard to isolate just one. We believe very strongly in developing and fine tuning a REPEATABLE process, regardless of what you’re doing.
The keyword there is repeatable and it is a recurring theme throughout the interviews that I conducted. When I asked Andy Hagan about what are some of the opportunities in social media that you see that marketers are not taking advantage of his answer was: Scale. One link bait success is a shot in the arm. One per week is a huge competitive advantage in organic.
So often I hear from someone that social media does not work for them because they submitted an article to Digg and it only got 4 votes and no traffic. To which I respond, what else did you do? Successful social media marketing is much too difficult to only do once, and hope that it succeeds. It is like trying to catch lightening in a bottle. Yes we would all like a YouTube campaign like the Coke and Mentos, but those kinds of success are the exception, not the rule.
Since mid-summer I have made a concentrated on getting some social media traffic at least once a week to this site. The table below shows the top ten traffic sources for a recent 90 day period.
One of the things that I have learnt from social media is that you need to continually do it, and if you promote your site on a regular basis that you will find that traffic starts appearing from unexpected places. Facebook is a top 10 referral to this blog, bit I have done absolutely nothing on Facebook to promote the site. I have written several posts about Facebook and it is these posts that have generated the traffic. An unexpected bonus from the posts.
For those marketing plans that depend on organic traffic from the search engines, note that organic search resulted in less than 25% of all traffic to the web site. And that is with this site ranking on the first page of Google for many competitive phrases like “Social Media Optimization”, “Facebook Marketing”.
One way that social media helps with organic search results is that if you continually promote your site and/or brand on social networks then you will see a residual link building effect. If on a continuous weekly basis, you are promoting your site on social networks, then you will steadily increase the number of links to your site. I launched this site 13 months ago. It now has over 6,000 links according to both Google Webmaster and Yahoo Site Explorer. Since these links have been acquired naturally (no paid links) the web site never got caught up in the Google Sandbox, and it ranks highly for a wide variety of competitive keywords.
Bottom line is that your social media marketing campaign should not be a one-off event. Promote your site on a regular basis and you will see a steady increase in traffic, search engine referrals and links.
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The idea of a “Social Media Marketing Campaign” is a bit odd in my mind; it sounds like an ad that’s going to run for six weeks, or something like that.
The marketers I’ve talked to hate SMM bacuse it is a constant, less predicatable and less measurable form of marketing. I’ve found it to be highly effective for my clients, if they make the commitment.
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