Author:  Jon Roberts
www.jnkservices.co.uk

You may have noticed that more and more social media is being talked about.  You cannot go anywhere without people asking for your Facebook handle, or asking you to tweet them!  [A tweet is the term used to describe a post on the website Twitter.com a great social media tool.]

Sites such as Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and Twitter allow casual social groups (and not so casual groups!) to communicate in a fairly informal way and have had a stark effect on how p2p communications are conducted in the 21st century.

Peter Kim recently wrote “The 22 Step Social Media Marketing Plan” where he lists 22 different types of social media tools – I must admit until I read his blog I could only list the following social media tools:  Blogs, Bookmarking, Content Aggregation, Discussion Boards, Pod-casting, Photo sharing, Mashups and Wikis.  His article is quite insightful and is well worth a read especially if, like me, you didn’t realise the huge number of different tools available.

Social Media Websites offer a website owner a great opportunity at free advertising.  For example, Twitter allows you to summarise a new product launch and give a link to it on your website in 140 characters or less.

Used regularly social media sites can really pay dividends in driving traffic to your websites giving you a great opportunity to show off your web design, using bookmaking tools such as Stumble Upon and Digg let others know about your site and give them the opportunity to visit it if they wish.  But this is an important point, and perhaps my reason for writing this post, give your readers the opportunity to visit the site – don’t ram it down their throats.

Let me give you an example, I use Twitter regularly most of the people I follow write 1-2 posts a day of well constructed comments.  A small minority seem to go mad and you end up with 10-20 posts at a time almost every hour!  This is over-doing it people!  This is the point when social media marketing turns into anti-social media marketing.  These sites are intended to allow like minded people to communicate with each other and not to become a mass marketing tool, please don’t abuse them.

Instead of writing about every minor change to your website, why not tell your readers about major events at your business, a special promotion, a new product line etc don’t be tempted to write a post for every product in your catalogue every single day, whilst you may be interested in this, your readers aren’t.

Don’t forget the old adage “Keep It Simple Stupid” or “KISS” applies to social media as well as other forms of marketing.  Don’t over tax your readers, some of the people I used to follow I have stopped following for that exact reason, they were posting too many entries about xyz product.

Keep your marketing posts relevant, short, interesting and don’t flood the social sites with posts.  You could also try using different social tools rather than flooding just one, turn your readers into fans – don’t bore them to death!