October 29 2007
Be a User — Of Social Media
With the advent of social media came a thousand new on-ramps to the information highway with a major benefit — giving users the ability to interact with your brand.
I admit it. I’m a social networking site junkie. I am always looking forward to that next hit. First it was friendster. Then I got into youtube. Then myspace. Then livejournal. Then facebook.
When you consider the internal capabilities of joining micro communities of groups with similar interests (the mullet review, anyone?), allowing people a little personal perspective on who you are via your profile, tagging the pictures you post, and your emoticon of the day - what you have is the ability of networking you, your services, and/or your business.
When it comes to viral marketing, my favorite is video. You can use video to push your own product or opinion, as well as share your ‘favorites’ with people by emailing them the link, or embedding the video in your own social media site profile. Even if the site you’re posting on has instituted a rel=”nofollow” to discourage higher-ranking attempts, traffic still will be sent to the intended site.
The following statistics show that over 40% of viewers of videos online follow through with some action. If you want a slice of that action, you have to be willing to put the work into creating and distributing the video. Once up, it’s a matter of measuring its success.
“eMarketer projects that by 2011, 86.6% of the US Internet population will consume online video, up from 62.8% in 2006.
In raw numbers, that means the number of viewers will rise from 114 million in 2006 to 183 million in 2011.”
With numbers like that, you can’t afford not to utilize video to your advantage.
A great example of this is when FlowCorp had OCC (Orange County Choppers) create a Flow Bike for them. With the grouping by category/topic that youtube does, it pushes tons of traffic to the flowcorp.com site. They not only have videos on youtube about their metal fabrication equipment that stand alone, but they also have videos of the OCC staff discussing the Flow Corp machines and showing the bike itself. This allows users to become educated about FlowCorp whether they are searching for metal fabrication, OCC, or custom motorcycles. They used their video pages to
- Engage/entertain their user
- Inform users about their product line
- Link back to their site
With video-sharing sites giving users the ability to copy and paste embed code into various social media platforms, viral marketing is something that can and should be utilized by anyone who is serious about marketing themselves or their brand. Be creative, be funny, be informative, and get your brand out there.
Written by b
