How Not To Do Social Media

 

What’s true: social media is now a very powerful force to reckon with when it comes to internet marketing.
What’s not: exploiting the people using them is the way to do it.
If you’ve ever been an internet marketer (or at least had a faint background about it), you should be familiar about the dark side of the industry. In reality, some internet marketers don’t just care. These type of marketers have one end goal – to make a sale for them to gain profits. Period.
The newest favorite tool of these evil marketers? Social media.


From the Internet Marketer’s Viewpoint

It is a rule of the thumb in internet marketing- go to where the people are.
In social media, it’s an underestimation to say the people are there. The exciting part is to realize that millions of people are there. If you do the math about campaigning and making a sale convert, you might have told yourself you’ve hit jackpot.
The problem though is that when it comes to internet marketing methods, there’s no rule or regulation. Marketers can literally do anything they want. And usually, it would make sense. If you blast out thousands of campaign tweets for example and get at least a 5% conversion rate, then you wouldn’t care about those 95% who got annoyed about your shameless marketing and you’ll go on gloating in some forum that you’ve achieved some form of ‘good’ result.
But is that really the case?

Social Media is About People… and People Are Not Dumb

This is where I beg to differ. I think that it’s inherently wrong for marketers to be abusive of the system (spams, TOC breaches of these social media sites, etc.) because at the end of the day, you don’t expect people to continuously fall for the same trap over and over again (assuming that they do fall in the first place).
As an internet marketer, your concern shouldn’t be just for a one time sale… but for a repeated loyal sale. And how do you get this result? Well, for starters, don’t go the easy route of just flooding these sites with your affiliate links.

Use Social Media as An Avenue

Look at how social marketers do social marketing.
Their method works like this – they do not directly market to people on these sites BUT they use social media as a tool to generate a following which pulls repeated hits to the pages where they market their products/services. There are three reasons why this trick works.

1. It builds a network of people which you can regularly tap
2. It positions you as a figure and as authority worth keeping an eye in to (in these sites, the results could be rapid)
3. You don’t give people a bad experience which might deter them from your marketing tactics in the future.

Let’s Look at YouTube Marketing For Example
If you’re not aware of this, let me explain a bit first. The concept is relatively simple, marketers tap in the power (the millions of audience actually) of YouTube to promote affiliate links via popularizing a video. One very common example is magic card tricks. If you search them on YouTube, you’ll see thousands of videos. If you try to view one, most likely, it’ll refer you to a link (which by the way is the marketers’ landing page).
The ruthless marketers are the ones who’d usually buy and/or pay for the videos just so their links would show up (and hopefully attract hits). Before, to a certain extent, this did work. However, if you use this tactic now, you’d rarely see any result (based on observations I’ve heard on forums). The explanation is this- people started to learn fast. They avoid these types of videos and immediately see through the bad marketing.

If you want to use it the right way, here’s how.
You use YouTube as an avenue to pull in traffic and readership to your niche page (preferably a blog). Set up a channel exclusive to this niche you are promoting and upload valuable (and/or entertaining) videos. Work on increasing your channel subscriptions. Through this, you are not only ensuring that your videos will gain viewers, you can also use your subscribers as a network that you can tap in anytime (YouTube also has group message features for subscribers).

In Conclusion
It isn’t rocket science in trying to figure out what these people in social media sites want – conversation. If all you do is flood walls or dashboards and think of it as one way (i.e. you don’t really need to respond and you just have to carry on with your ad campaign), chances are you’re losing something valuable. You’re losing the prospect of future buyers.

Never engage in bad marketing practices. Especially when it comes to social media. Even if you’re savvy, remember, you’re not the only smart person out there. People think before they bite your bait too.

http://seo-hacker.com/social-media-marketing/