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Biggest Key Ingredient to Social Media Success

You've probably seen a lot of so-called gurus out there typing up and advising you that social media is "the next big thing".

I'm here to tell you it's already gone mainstream with the general populace and news media having all kinds of coverage of Facebook, MySpace, and now the new darling Twitter. Even sites which are considered more tech savvy and niche like Digg, Mashable, and even LinkedIn are getting national play and publicity.

Social media in all its forms is already mainstream and continues to have explosive growth with both the number of users and the amount of time they spend using the various sites and services going through the roof. And this trend has only been accelerating within the last six months...the extreme growth is continuing and actually picking up speed.

So you need to be already ahead of the pack with the most cutting edge tactics so that your brand and your business have all the visibility you can handle. Because if you don't get there I guarantee your competitors will and probably already are.

The biggest key... the one super key to social media success is understanding what social media is. At its core it's a value exchange.

It's not just another channel for you to send blatant advertisements to any of your friends or followers on the services. There is a certain etiquette and social code which you must follow to maintain the quality of your brand and avoid getting cut down and ostracized.

The viral nature of the word-of-mouth on social media moves at incredible speed so if you do something bad you know the people who saw you do it are going to tell eight or 10 of their friends and those people probably tell five or six and those people three or four on down the line.

I've just been reading the book where the author talks about big problems he had with a Dell laptop he purchased and how unhelpful customer service was to him. He has a pretty well read blog with a passionate following of readers and they just lit up the blogosphere once he wrote a post about it.

Dell's official policy at the time was bloggers don't matter and just ignore it.

They quickly found out what a mistake this was when they started losing market share and getting more incredible amounts of negative buzz. This is about the time Michael Dell came back in to right the ship and now they have a corporate blogging team. The executives have blogs. And they actually have employees checking the blogosphere and responding in comments.

Dell has turned around their negative image in social media and are now righting the ship.

One of the biggest things you want to do in this value exchange is to monitor what people are saying about you. You can set these things up in Twitter to search for whatever keyword your company is and get a pulse on what people are saying right now.

You can also search for groups on Facebook and MySpace about your company or brand. And if you're a small company starting out you can set up these groups inducing posts on Twitter to your content packed blog stories to start building that buzz and your presence in social media.

Just don't link to blatant info capturing pages or outright sales letters. You will get a backlash for sure by doing that. So just stay away from that nonsense.

Link to blog posts and other quality stories you find which would be of interest to your market and your friends and then intermingle with that some of your own stories and comments.

This will give you the best you chance for success.

Seed Newsvine

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