Posted by Chris Richardson
Even though the New Year is awfully young, apparently the popular topic for those who follow the Internet industry (especially search) is marketing via the social media outlets. While this subject has a few titles – linkbait, viral marketing, WOMM – the idea is the same: create compelling enough content to get the attention of social news sites like Digg, Reddit, and Furl (actually, you are trying to attract the users of these sites, but you get the idea).
In case you are wondering which of these services gets used the most and therefore ones you should be targeting, SEOmoz has a post discussing social sites and points the finger at Digg as the “holy grail” of social media.
The reason for said honor has to do with the amount of users Digg commands. The larger the audience, the greater the exposure – a benefit Rand discussed at the Las Vegas PubCon indicating stories that made the front page of Digg usually see an exponential increase of backlinks.
Like I said, the way to get the attention of these social media outlets is to develop attractive content that people will want to link to. However, what do you do if you subject is boring or dry (real estate, insurance, legal advice)? How do you attract social site users when operating from this perspective? Graywolf has some ideas:
In one of his recent posts, Graywolf advises those who are in industries that could be considered boring need to be creative in their social media approach. The example he used was targeted towards car insurance providers – not the most exciting subject in the world, especially when it comes to social media users (unless it’s bad news for the company).
The linkbaiting strategy he suggested was to use another piece of user-created media (in this case, a video showing a super genius riding on top of his vehicle or “Ghost Riding the Whip”) and relate that to your industry. In the case of the example video, Graywolf suggests writing an article discussing how actions like these can be extremely dangerous and can cause havoc with insurance companies.
The brilliance of this idea lies in the fact that you would be using media that already has a social news attraction (people love watching video of folks hurting themselves or their property). By “repackaging” this content to include warnings and other helpful information should increase the value and therefore, more social media users will be exposed to your message.
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