Using Social Media to Promote Your Products and Website Part 1

By David Lakins, Managing Director of Key Multimedia

There is a lot of talk about Blogging, RSS, Social Networking and Web 2.0 at the moment which is enough to make your head spin. However, Social Networking can be a great way to have your website or products promoted by word-of-mouth.

Social Networking definition:

‘online technologies and practices that allow people to share their opinions, insights and experiences with each other. That information can be shared as text, images, audio or video via blogs, message boards, wikis, RSS, podcasts and social networking sites.’

At the heart of social media is the ability of individuals to interact with other people so that they feel involved and part of a community. A big part of this phenomenon is the activity of finding, sharing and recommending products, services, events and experiences to like-minded people. This is where social media crosses over with marketing

If you can get people to talk about and recommend your products and services to their peers, it is more powerful than any marketing you can buy.

Some simple tips to get started in Social Networking

1) Create a MySpace Page

MySpace (http://www.myspace.com) is the largest and best-known social network. Individuals create profiles about themselves and then invite similarly minded people to become their online friends. When someone becomes a friend, you can communicate with them and subtly direct them towards your own website.

Setting up your own page is simple and free. Go to http://www.myspace.com and follow the instructions. Put up a brief description about yourself and a link to a more detailed biography page on your own website. Remember, the goal of this page is to drive people to your own website so make sure you get plenty of links included without overtly promoting your website.

2) Add Bookmarking Links to Your Article Pages

A big part of the social web is the ability for people to build lists of their favourite sites or articles. People with similar interests can then share their lists and benefit from other people's recommendations. If you have news or product articles on your website you should make these articles easy to bookmark or add to favourites lists. There are a lot of internet sites that now host and share bookmarks. You can add links to these sites to your article pages.

There are two ways of doing this. You can go to each of the leading bookmarking sites and download their code and links onto your site. The ones that you should include are:

• Digg - www.digg.com
• Technorati – www.technorati.com
• Del.icio.us – www.del.icio.us
• Reddit – www.reddit.com

However, if you go this route it can be time consuming and you will omit many of the potential bookmarking sites. The alternative is to put a link to AddThis.com (www.addthis.com) on the foot of each page. This gives your users access to over 30 bookmarking sites.

3) Add an RSS Feed

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Syndication, depending on who you ask. RSS allows people to be notified every time new articles are added to your website so they can keep up to date with your content.

Ask your developer to create some RSS code for your website and then put a link on all of your pages to the RSS code page. The link should be a small orange rectangle with the letters RSS in white.