Social Media Changes Will Leave Many Webmasters at The Bottom

Recently, there is a lot of talk about the shifting of internet marketing trends. As new technology arises in both the hardware and software realms, there is one element that has more power than those two combined. I’m talking about "people." 

Consumers are evermore becoming smarter to the tricks that have been played upon them in the past. There is no more "Fool me once, shame on you!" Any business that does business online, won't get the chance to sell to customers if they don't change the way they market to people. More specifically I’m talking about social media marketing, social bookmarking, and their own web presence. There are only a small handful of people who have really harnessed the power of social bookmarking and social media tactics, so let's look at them.

The Internet is a vast and yet cluttered place which makes it hard to establish a big presence. The most popular trend right now seems to be creating a web presence through article syndication. The problem with that is that it takes time to write the articles, a lot of time to submit them to various places, and even after that it takes an incredible amount of time to have them picked up by other websites and search engines. It will gain your website some back links over time and you will slowly move up the search engine rankings, but again it’s going to take time.

But get this… 

Isn’t it much faster to just “tell” people about it? Traditionally we know that “word of mouth” travels extremely fast and becomes viral very quickly. Of course bad news travels faster than good, right? But educational, enlightening, and entertaining news travels even faster! So why aren’t people using that to their advantage online? As I mentioned before, a handful of people are doing just that. So why aren’t you?

As more and more social sites come out such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and social bookmarking sites like Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon, and Technorati, the easier it’s becoming to get the “word” out. So by gaining popularity on sites like those, you can potentially send a message to thousands of people, who will then tell thousands more. The best way would be to make friends with popular people on these networks and have them post a message to their followers.

Great! Sign me up so I can build a list of friends. Not so fast!

Because of the fact that these communities are social, you will quickly become unpopular if you start spamming any sort of message to people whether it is promotional, educational, or entertaining in nature. I’ve been saying for years that “you can only fool a customer once,” but things have change. In today’s society, you will be lucky if you even get to do it once.

You need to build a lot of trust with your friends and followers online. And just as important, you need to have something worth saying. The saying “content is king” is even more important now than it was only a few short years ago.

If you aren’t gearing your business strategies towards social media, then you will have a difficult time surviving the changes. As Charles said something similar to, you have to unlearn everything you’ve been taught about marketing in order to survive the new trends that are emerging. I couldn’t agree any more than that!

 - S.H.W.

Since you’ve finished and have continuted here, I guess you are still interested in learning more. Try Synnd by SocialMediaScience.com. Yes that was a pair affiliate links in the last sentence. I will be paid if you make any purchases through them. And guess what? You can even get your own personal link without paying a cent!

P.S. I think they still have a $1 trial for 14 days.