Businesses both large and small are fighting to get involved in social media, the craze is spreading like wildfire. But how much do you know about it? Well, don’t feel bad if you don’t know the answer, I was in your situation two weeks back. I wrote the first draft of this post couple of weeks ago. But it wasn’t good enough and didn’t really add value to our readers, so Charan wanted me to re-write it. I had the task scheduled in my Manymoon projects, and the task is now overdue by about a week (not a good sign eh?). Yeah but now I’m ready to re-write it with aafter a good amount of research and speaking with those in the know.
Social media is a new phenomenon addressed differently – geeks call it web 2.0, marketers call it social media, and others call it social communication. Hopefully this post will help businesses to understand the concept of social media and the best social media sites to that can help you improve web traffic and reach out to your customers.
Delicious, Digg, Facebook and Wikipedia are just some examples, but today there are literally hundreds of other social media sites used by businesses to improve website traffic.
Social media is a broad term, the best way to understand it is by narrowing it down. Now, you can see how each one of these has helped us develop and track SEO performance of our homepage and the other landing pages.
– Social News Sites are great for finding useful resources, articles, and information on the web. We submit our blog posts and any other news relating to Creately to many news sites. Digg, Yahoo Buzz, Reddit and Propeller are a few of the best news sites which bring in the highest number of visitors. These sites offer the ability to actively participate in the discussion by leaving comments on popular news items. Once you submit links, you can vote up people’s submissions, as well as vote down stories that you don’t like. Interacting and connecting with people with similar interests cannot be any easier!
– Social Bookmarking Sites allow users to save their favorite sites with tags/keywords to manage and organize them easily for later use. Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon are always the highest referring sites at creately.com. We save our blog posts, landing pages and other relevant articles. Bookmarking sites not only allow you to save and share your favorite websites, but you can also look at what other people have found interesting enough to tag. Thanks to Charan, I’ve gained immensely through Charan’s Del.icio.us bookmarks. Just type in any web or marketing keyword and I bet you’ll find loads of interesting and useful resources!
– Social Networking Sites have become increasingly popular these days. Twitter is a great networking platform we engage in for interacting with our customer, well-wishers and prospective users. Tweetdeck is a Twitter application that helps us organize, update and handle all your tweets and followers. The best part of this is the ease of managing conversations which interests you. Hootsuite is another web-based Twitter application we love. It’s best feature is the ability to schedule tweets for later delivery and getting your whole team manage your Twitter presence. You can now sit back and relax while all your tweets are sent out at the scheduled times.
Twitter has undoubtedly helped us gain users and so has Facebook. We continuously post our articles on our Creately’s Facebook profile – we have 200 fans currently and it’s still growing. We love it when our articles are re-posted, liked and commented by our fans from all over the world.
– Social Photo, Video and Multimedia Sharing Sites are great tools for sharing photos, videos and presentations. At Creately, we don’t do a lot of photo sharing, but all our screencasts, demo videos and tutorial videos are all broadcast via YouTube and numerous other video sharing services. YouTube has been a medium to help us reach out to our users demonstrate Creately’s ease of use and capabilities. In fact, we’re working on a new video for our homepage at the moment – so watch this space!
We also make presentations and upload them on Slideshare. Our users have always liked our attempt in presenting our landing page contents in simple slides. We’re hoping to do at least one slidehsare presentation a month. Fingers crossed!
– Wikis are sites which allow people to freely create and edit any number of hyper linked web pages. These help people know about the Creately as online diagramming software, its use, benefits and features. Besides Wikipedia, there are a host of other niche wikis that may be useful to your business like – WikiHow, WikiSpaces & WikiAnswers.
Social media plays a vital role in the marketing of Creately.com. These sites have contributed exceptionally well in building traffic and will help any marketer promote his/her business. I’ve put up a quick diagram illustrating the 20 best social news sites that we engage in – enjoy it!