The New Rules of Social Marketing

• How many social sites do you belong to?
• How much traffic has this resulted in for your main site?
• Do you put in a lot of time of a few social sites or a little time on a lot of social sites?
• Which is better?

I have the answer…

Putting in more time on fewer sites is absolutely better than trying to be on 100 social sites with no chance of having a meaningful presence on any of them.

Social marketing is not like it was 2 years ago.

Today you get nothing of value from having a profile on a social site with no meaningful presence aside from a picture of yourself and a link to your site.  In the beginning, Google ate up all the links it found from social sites and followed every single one.

It has become a cat and mouse game of finding social sites that actually lend you any Google juice from your links.

So using social sites for search engine links is out unless you are using spamming programs to hit every one of the thousands of social communities on the web.  And even that is a pretty poor bet these days.  Leave that to the guys who love to play that game with Google.

You Now Have Permission to Chill Out About Social Marketing!

Because I have hundreds of social profiles all over the web, most abandoned now, I can tell you that merely setting up an account with most of those sites has played no significant part in my traffic increases over the last year.

I get the most traffic from the social sites on which I have a meaningful presence.  In the last several months I have been scaling way back on the sites I use for “outposting” and traffic.  The time I used to put in on joining massive numbers of sites is now put into a few that send the most traffic and that I enjoy being on regularly.

When you get right down to it, although there are thousands of sites you can join, there really aren’t many that have hit critical mass.  Meaning, their popularity in comparison to the standard bearers (Twitter vs. Tumblr, Digg vs. Reddit) isn’t big enough to spend a lot of time on.

When you see a big list of social sites, instead of trying to join them all and getting frustrated by the time suck that can be social marketing, be hyper-critical and really find the site(s) in the list that will truly help you get the word out about your site.

In a list of 100 social sites there’s only going to be one or two worth joining for what you want to accomplish.  That should really put you at ease about this social marketing thing.

It is entirely possible for you to have a blog and a Twitter account and become one of the most popular and profitable in your niche.  You can be more effective and have a bigger following than someone else in your niche who has hundreds of social site accounts.  And this includes search engine rankings and traffic.

Friday Traffic Report Social Strategy for 2009

Because I’ve tested the 2nd and 3rd tier social sites extensively and have found the effort to be unmatched by results, I am confident in my plan for 2009.  I am scaling way, way back on the number of sites, widgets, and tools I use to attract a following for the blog.

I have found, by trying a lot of different social sites, my personal core list of sites that give me the most traffic in return for interacting on them regularly.

My core list will be different from yours.  I have social sites I belong to that are “verticals” for my niche.  Yours will be different because you’ll be joining sites with groups that are most targeted for your niche.

Death of the Widget

Your own blog will tell you when it’s time to take your pulse and trim the fat.  If you have more than 10 widgets from different social communities you belong to in your sidebar(s), you need an intervention.  I used to have every conceivable button and widget possible on my sidebars.  You simply cannot put everything you belong to in your sidebars.  The effect is total confusion, not only for your readers, but for you as well.

Building a Massive Presence with Far Fewer Social Accounts

The rule for social marketing is this: The fewer sites you spend more time on, the bigger your business can grow.

This may seem like an obvious point, but most people aren’t watching what’s happening around them.  Scoble is on sites like Twitter and Friendfeed.  He surely has more social accounts with different services, but his effective presence is in just a few places.  And his following is massive.

Darren Rowse is so into Twitter he created TwiTip just to blog about Twitter tactics and further grow his following with that one site.

There are examples like this all over the web in every niche where there are wildly popular bloggers, and then everyone else.  The cynics will say it is because they were already wildly popular before they started getting popular on sites like Twitter.  But there are also examples where people have had obscure blogs who really got into Facebook, Twitter, or Digg and turned into superstars in their niche.

Their blogs became more well-known as a result of focusing on a handful of social sites, so it goes both ways.

The worst thing I could do now is answer that question burning in your mind right now:  “So which sites should I join and spend the most time on?”

Normally I’d have a list of sites for you to join, but I see now that it would be a big mistake and misleading to you.  I don’t know your niche or your target audience.  Tech bloggers and marketing geeks do well on Twitter.  Their followers are comfortable with that site.  I can’t say definitively whether that will be the case for you.

What I would recommend is that you download the Authority Black Book (2009 Edition) and read about all the different places on the web you can check out, but with a critical eye.  Your job is not to join hundreds of sites.  It is to join several of the most targeted communities and sites for your market and test which ones are going to be the best for you.

Scale Back and Relax

Put aside the guilt and pressure you heap upon yourself over the “number” of sites you haven’t signed up for yet or the amount of time you are not spending on myriad different sites each day.  Relax.  You should be on a mission to find the few among the many.  The sites that will give you the best access to your target market in relation to the amount of time you spend building a real, meaningful presence on them are the most important.

Don’t take my word for it.  Look at what the big dogs are using in your niche, and you will quickly find people like me who are putting more and more time into fewer and fewer places on the web that get them results.

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