How to be the social media guy?

As understood, the term ‘Social media guy’ was completely made up by me, but it doesn’t mean that it is completely senseless. From the past few years the power of the internet has turned out to be like a game of democracy, its you who has the power to spread and harness information and you can give the power to someone else worthier. In other terms a person with a good stance on social media is a person who has the ultimate power, he has the power to spread information, generate traffic, make millions and generate awareness.

Recently I heard about this guy who calls himself as The G_man, this guy has his presence on all social media sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter and Facebook, but not just a normal presence but a very influential one too. 44% of the articles he diggs gets popular on Digg, he’s got 98000 followers on Twitter and one tweet can lead to thousands of visitors, 670 people subscribe to him on StumbleUpon and every submission gives the webpage atleast 3000 visitors. I really have no idea who this guy is, but with this power he can make thousands of dollars, this guy can be called as ‘The Social Media Guy’.

There are many things to follow to be like this guy, his times were easier than ours, some main points are analyzed by me below -

Be active

At first don’t start to promote your own site, promote other posts and blogs which you might find of interest. Spend sometime every week on your favorite social media sites and try to give your best out to the community. If the community feels that they can expect something good from you, it’ll always be favorable towards you.

Don’t forget to give attention to other users, their interests, their profiles and favorites. React to their posts, review them and give feedbacks. Make sure you make up good relations with people or bloggers interested in your niche, be their friend on other social sites.  The key is to spend one hour a day on your favorite social media site and do your best to establish a community around your blog.

Make friends

The main aim of social sites is to make friends and connect with old colleagues, classmates and just mates. As soon as you create an account, try to find all those people whom you know and then those who are interested in you. Surf around the place and try to find people with similar interests, then contact them and keep in constant touch.

Networking plays an important role in social media, many times even with great content, I didn’t get the exposure I needed due to my lack of networking, but from the past few months I’ve been quite active on sites such as Facebook and Myspace which also helped me increase my traffic base.

Exchange favors

Once you’ve made good friends and are quite confident with your network, you can start helping and start asking for return favors to promote your blog. There are a set of sites were you can do this easily, but it won’t help you build a network for future promotions and its never effective when your using such methods for free.

When you’ve posted a new article don’t hesitate to send it to friends for their reviews and promotions. By now you should have had a big network interested in your niche, so make sure you ask them to promote a good written article or else you’ll loose your network and also remember to give return favors.

Onsite exposure

Most of my network on Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter and Facebook comes from my blog, so its really important that you give links on your site and encourage users to connect with you in those social media sites. Install buttons on your blog for your readers submit your posts on social media sites, this even increases your visibility on that particular site.

This is really efficient as most of your people from your network will be people who are interested in your blog, it also helps in getting return visitors and increases engagement with your users.

Snowball effect

When someone discovers your site and recommends it to the community, it sends a trigger to his friends and networks and when all of them start to vote and recommend it to their own friends, it sends a message to the social site which recommends it to many of its users. Many social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Mixx, Buzz and propeller do this by adding your post to the front page.

This system is similar in most social media sites, so be sure to take the maximum advantage of this, by turning visitors into subscribers, gaining new bookmarks and monetizing it to the full.

Invest money

By investing money I mean advertising your post on social media sites, this is not similar to adwords or others because such campaigns should help you spread virally, and should lead to continuous traffic even when your campaign ends. In such methods you don’t  pay for just clicks or visitors, you pay for users to rate your post and recommend it to their friends.

I usually invest on StumbleUpon, and till now I’ve had great success with it, every StumbleUpon advertising campaign has given me more than my money back, its also helped me go viral on other networks such as Twitter and Digg. Most of my visitors from StubmleUpon usually Digg and retweet my posts, thats why I said that my StumbleUpon campaigns were priceless.

On to our readers

I always advice readers to concentrate more on social media than search engines and in the past few days I got to know that I was right, the above post contains just a few things required to be a social media guy, maybe there is another way or a short cut, so please do share it with us in the comments below.

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