What kind of social media marketer are you?

As the owner of a search marketing company I spend a lot of time thinking about, and talking to, people about online marketing. Whenever I talk to people within the industry about social media marketing, it becomes apparent quite quickly what aspect of social media that they focus on.

Social media marketers fall into four camps; Linkers, Traffickers, Bloggers, or Explorers. Each camp takes a different approach to social media marketing. Which camp do you belong to?

Linkers
Social media sites are often some of the best places to obtain a high number of links to a web site in a very short period of time. Why spend hours getting 6-10 directory links to a web site when you can get hundreds of links with 1 hour of social media work? Linkers know what social media sites pass page rank from their profile page and what social media sites use no follow in their links. They know that Yahoo has begun to block other search engines from spidering Delicious and what that means to the value of a Delicious link.

Traffickers
Social media sites are notorious for sending huge waves of traffic to a web site. Having a site crash under the weight of Digg traffic is almost a right of passage into the traffic cops world. Traffickers understand that a lot of social media traffic is transient. It comes for the post and then disappears as quickly as it came. Traffickers know what are the best social sites are in each industry and what ones can send you high quality traffic.

The common thread between linkers and traffickers is that both are focusing all their efforts on one web site. It is all about driving traffic or getting links for www.mysite.com.

Bloggers
Bloggers are different than linkers or traffic cops in that they participate in the conversation regardless of what blog that conversation is taking place on. Bloggers will interview each other, leave comments on each others blogs and quote each other in posts. These tactics all extend and expand the conversation away from one central location (ie the web site) and instead allow the conversation to spread across the Internet. Bloggers don’t mind given up control of the conversation, as long as they can still participate in it.

Explorers
The original concept behind Social Media Optimization was to allow your content to travel. Explorers are wiling to go anywhere online to evangelize about their product or service. Whether that interaction takes place in a forum, newsgroup, video site like YouTube or picture site like Flickr, explorers have formatted their material and message to fit the new environment.

What kind of social media marketer are you?