Using Social Media to promote your Products and Website Part 2

By David Lakins, Managing Director of Key Multimedia

Continuation of the topic of "Using Social Media to promote your Products and Website"

4) Email to a Friend

Enabling people to easily email an article to a friend is not typically bundled under the heading of social media marketing, but in my view it is another way to encourage people to share and recommend your content. Add an ‘Email a Friend' link to all of your content pages.

5) Add a Forum

Having a Forum on your website is a great way of building a community around your subject area. Monitoring the forum will both give you a chance to understand what people are discussing and promote your expertise by adding your own comments.

The downside of a forum is it does need to be carefully managed. You need to allow people to make negative comments so they don't feel they are being censored, but you also moderate any aggressive behaviour, personal insults, spam and meaningless rubbish. This can be time-consuming work, so don't bother with a forum unless you have the time to do it properly.

Non-technical people can pay to use vBulletin (www.vbulletin.com). More technical people can use a free Open Source solution such as PHPBB (www.phpbb.com).

6) Create How-To or Product Review Videos

It has never been easier to create short videos that can demonstrate your expertise. How-to videos are very popular. For example, if your business is about removing bumps and scratches from a car’s paintwork, you could create a short video on "How to remove minor scratches from your car’s bodywork". Make sure you have your website URL on the opening and closing sequence of your video to promote your website.

Post your videos on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com ) and Google Videos (http://video.google.com/ ). Give it a catchy title and teaser to get people interested. Also link to the videos from your own website.

7) Share Your Photos

If you have photos related to your subject area, post them on photo sharing websites such as Flikr (http://www.flikr.com ) and PhotoBucket (http://www.photobucket.com ).

8) Create a Blog

Blogs are very simple content sites where short articles are listed one after the other on the home page. They are usually used to write about current events or comment on news.

Some successful content websites are blogs. Some are much more like magazines with feature articles. If your site is more feature-based, consider starting a separate blog that can be more informal and brief. Update the blog every day even if it is with just one- or two-sentence comments. Blogs that are infrequently updated quickly lose their audience.

Use the blog to drive traffic to your main website.

You can get basic blogging software for free. Try Wordpress (http://www.wordpress.com ) or Blogger (http://www.blogger.com ).

Conclusion

In many ways, today's social media technologies are still fairly primitive, but I can say with confidence that the phenomenon that they have created – of customers taking control of the buying process – is here to stay. Customers will continue to get stronger, so publishers, manufacturers and anyone else with customers need to listen to what they are saying.

If you jump into the social media world, be ready to participate, listen, learn and take action.