What’s one of the easiest ways to generate buzz and consistently get massive amounts of traffic from social media websites?
The answer is simple: Control distribution of your content by leveraging the clout of popular and powerful individuals within the social media community. In other words, influence the influencers.
When these prominent individuals talk, others will listen. They are respected or liked by others in the same community. They have the ability easily initiate and popularize discussions on a specific topic.
They are mavens and connectors; thought leaders and hubs with large networks of friends and sources. They connect people to ideas and each other by sharing relevant content/concepts and encouraging multi-lateral discussions.
A clear example of how influencers can capture mindshare and generate buzz can be seen in popular bloggers who have a wide audience reach. Their review or criticism of a specific product or phenomenon can and do often lead to diverging or similar chains of opinion/dialog within the social sphere.
Every social media website is the same. There are a few select individuals who stand out, not only because of their activeness within the community but because they have proven their loyalty or expertise, hence gaining the trust and support of like-minded social media users.
These powerful individuals are precisely the ones you want to influence.
Influencing Social Media Users: An Introduction
Social media encompasses a variety of websites, from bookmarking communities to social video channels and walled networking platforms like Facebook. Instead of trying cover each social media type, I’ve decided to make the main focus of this article on social news sites like Digg, Reddit or Propeller.
However, bear in mind that what is listed here will and do apply to other social media websites as well. This article will give you hints on how to develop your own strategy for targeting, connecting with and piggybacking off the influence of popular social media users. Take what is here and throw it on any social website. It’ll fit.
Social Media Marketing for Community News Websites
Social news/voting sites are community sites which allow the audience to determine the value of the content through the use of up or down votes. Within these communities, there are several active individuals which are well connected with other users and in tune with the preferences of the community in question.
Social media marketers have long pursued two main strategies for success on social news sites like Digg and they have worked without fail for a long time.
These two main strategies are as follows:
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- Become the Influencer. This entails building up a legitimate social media power account and gradually developing clout within the community. It involves actively participating in the community with the goal of ultimately developing authority and influence. This time consuming process allows you to easily increase the potential for success across the board.
- Develop a Network. Gradually build a network of social media supporters; people who will vote up your content or share it with other friends. This is often practiced by bloggers in their bid to dominate social media attention via coordinated voting. This can backfire if the social media community or algorithm is sophisticated enough to detect artificial behavioral patterns.
In contrast, the third method (which is the topic of this article) is more simple and yet equally effective. It also requires less resources and time, thereby allowing you to target multiple social media websites at once.
How to Influence Popular Social Media Users
If you can pitch other bloggers or journalists for a link or mention, you can most certaintly pitch social media users. The aim of introducing yourself and your content to the social media user is simple: you want to leverage their brand or influence by getting him or her to promote your website or content within the community.
This is rather similar to the process of getting links from popular blogs and it can definitely be achieved with some initial effort of your own. I have done this several times and it is something anyone can do with some instruction.
In my opinion, there are three main phases for the entire process:
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- Targeting. At this stage, you’ll have to pick several social media users you want to build a relationship with. Ideally, these selected individuals should have degree or clout while being possibly interested in your material. They should be reachable via various communication channels.
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- Networking. This is the point where you’ll make first contact with the social media user and start to develop some sort of friendly relationship with him or her. The goal is here is to ultimately convert the user into a supporter of your content. This is a crucial stage and tact or people skills are needed for success.
- Pitching. This is the last stage and will begin when you start to pitch the social media user for the first time. You should be confident that the user will not reject your content because you’ve taken out most of the guesswork through the two earlier stages. This phase should be continued by the continual maintenance of the established relationship.
The three steps above are sequential are should be followed in the right order, unless you have a source that can introduce you directly to the perfect social media user for your site.
1. Targeting: Finding the Right Social Media User
The more your content fits with the social media influencer’s interests or profile, the more likely they will promote it. I cannot stress the importance of relevance, so do put some effort and spend some time to find the right social media user.
Ideally, you should be able to discover their preferences through the type of content they usually share with the community (or in the case of other social media sites, the interests listed on the public user profile). Not every user is the same. For instance, some Digg users have different interests and will only submit certain content.
Let’s do some examples: Digg user cosmikdebris is dedicated to the general sciences, schestowitz submits programming/computer-related stories, noupsellfocuses exclusively on politics and webtech focuses on web 2.0 or social media.
On the other hand, top users like msaleem and zaibatsu are interested in a wide variety of general topics and are likely to submit content from a variety of fields.
If you want your stuff to go viral, try to make it coherent with the influencer’s beliefs or interests. This makes it much easier for them to promote your stuff.
Ways to Find the Right Social Media Users
There are two ways to find the right social user that fits your content. One is to examine any public user ranking list (like this list of top Digg users) in order to determine who has influence. Visit each profile on the ranking list and check out their submissions in order to get a feel on what topic interests them.
