How to make yourself a name on social media networks
This is starting to be more and more important in the future for all search engines, not only the big G, they call these social signals and they are gaining ground on quality link building practices that have been the foundation of SEO for a over a decade. Problem is how can you achieve this? A lot of posts are talking about “content for end users”, create “compelling pages”, “be a voice in the community”…all very nice nebulous advice but what does it really mean? (except to repeat and kiss the ass of Big G!) What are genuine ways to get on social media that works? Well I have a few ideas on how to do this.
The nuts and bolts of finding where and how to contribute
Pick you social network, you have a lot of choice obviously. But try to choose the one that matter to you. I’ve made a list over here to 147 social media sites, it’s a great way to start anyways. Once you find your niche, search for posts, member and conversations that concerns your business or interests.
Once you have registered on sites, what to do next?
After you have chosen your sites and registered, find groups , give free advice and answer questions, this is similar to the Yahoo answers strategy. However, as I have experienced in the past, Yahoo can sometimes “decide” to delete all your questions and answers…and all your time and effort goes down the drain reciprocally… So by using a multitude of social media properties you don’t put you eggs in the same basket. The more you diversify, the less likely you will be at the mercy of a single large content provider likeYahoo answers or Wikipedia, remember when Wikipedia was dofollow? 
Link to your contributions and content on social media sites
If you create good answers to some problems that a lot of people are facing, for example an article I did on how to stop Google instant you will see that the traffic comes in naturally if you plug your solution on a few social sites. Put your teaser on the site with a read more… and that will make visitors leave the social platform to go to your resource. Don’t give the social media site all the gravy, keep that for your site so they will have no choice but to visit you site to get the really juicy content.
So in retrospective these are five steps that should help in Web 2.0 marketing:
- Find good sites to join (if possible in your niche)
- Register on ALL of them
- Search the sites for problems visitors have
- Solve the problem partially with full solutions on your site
- Link to the part solution on the Web 2.0 websites