Social Media - Resistance is Futile (and Potentially Harmful to Your Success)

Are you resistant to using social bookmarking tools because you think: they’re a waste of time, you have no time for them, or because you think they’re a passing phase? If so—sadly—, you are leaving money on the table.
These free social tools are not going away any time soon. On the contrary, they’re increasing in popularity because they deliver what today’s online user wants. Online users are embracing Web 2.0 tools like Twitter, Facebook, and others because they enhance the aspect people most like about the internet—feeling connected with others.

If you embrace these tools and use them to your advantage, you can definitely benefit. It doesn’t take as much time and energy as you think! Here are some ideas for pain-free social marketing:

Online Profiles

Spending a bit of time creating some online profiles on social sites is something you just need to do once in order to see ongoing results. The results could be that when someone Googles you, they find your profiles which all link back to your website(s). Social sites are highly indexed and because you can create professional looking profiles on many sites (like LinkedIn, Google, or HubPages, for instance), this does good things for your online reputation. Sites like forums, social bookmarking, web 2.0 pages, and social networking sites often include a bio line (which gives you a chance to toot your own horn as a professional and an expert), plus a URL line that can provide more SEO power for your website / blog.

Social Bookmarking

When you write a great article or launch a product, social bookmarking can launch that URL into cyberspace and bring you traffic both via search engines who crawl those sites and index those links according to tags, categories, and descriptions, as well as via people who hang out on those sites and click links when they see something interesting. You can add social tools and aggregators like Onlywire to your browser toolbar so that social bookmarking is as easy as hitting a button and a few keystrokes. You can also add tools to your sites that allow your readers to bookmark for you as well with the click of a button!

Micro Blogging

Telling the world what you’re doing in 140 characters or less might seem irrelevant to you but people LOVE Twitter. People and search engines read those updates and the links you list can help you get more traffic. You don’t even have to micro-blog manually all the time because of various tools that can be set up to automatically update your status line for you! Tools like HubPages could send a link out as soon as you publish something new, like this hub: 7 Social Marketing Actions – Making the Most of Social Media for Your SEO, which I’ve just tweeted — (with just the click of a button) and shown the link to over 500 people on my list  plus displayed in the Twitter public timeline, too!

Anyone can see the tweet, and search engines could also index that tweet related to some of the keywords within it! Then…someone who enjoys reading the info could re-tweet or bookmark that post and create some pretty positive viral results!

With all the benefits and SEO power of social marketing, it doesn’t take a lot of time or effort to bring about great results. Instead of thinking you can’t afford to spend time on these types of tools it might be time to change your thinking to the reality that you really can’t afford “not” to spend just a few minutes a day taking advantage of all the benefits of social bookmarking, online profiles, video marketing, and micro blogging.  Matt Bredel’s SEO Exciter 10-part free SEO tutorial series is a great place to start!