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[E312]Ethics In Social Marketing

by Stanil Dobrev, Sta

I love to explore new fields and I was wondering how good is the social marketing that people are trying to do. I read a book with tips on how you can improve your twitter experience and how easy it is to drive traffic to your site with a short post of 140 characters.

In the book there was an example how the author get 20-30 visits to his site from just one post when he has about 1000 followers. OK... I started to think - if I have 3k followers then I can have 100 visitors to my site with just one post.
Sounds great, right?

And here comes the experiment... I'm web developer and I thought I should try making a tool that is twitter-related. Obviously when I try to pull traffic from twitter I should make a tool or share information that is targeted to these users.
So I made a small tool where you enter your twitter details and it displays a map of your twitter followers. It is a visual representation of the locations of the user's followers.

In this tool I used the twitter API to pull the list of followers and then I put pins on Google map (this is the tool: http://friendloc.webily.com/).

It is free tool and I don't have anything put on this page to generate leads or any attempts for monetization of the traffic. It is just an experiment for now... so... let's see the results.

I have more than 2k followers on twitter and I posted 2 updates about this tool. I made these posts in the most active time on twitter. Actually this is what I supposed is the most active time - the evenings in USA, because most of my followers are Americans.

From these 2 posts I have total of 12 visitors to the site. Not a great result, but I suppose it can be improved if I'm more active on twitter. You see... you need to establish connection with your followers and bring really valuable (and mostly free) information. And you should chat with them more actively. I love twitter and I find really great information and resources from the post of the twitters I follow. When I love the posting I try to thank the poster and build a relationship... I discuss the resource shared with him and this is a kind of becoming friend with this particular user.

If you make lot of friends there probably your results will be better.

So try to give valuable information, try to interact more with your followers and you're on the right path to drive targeted traffic to your site.

And just a quick comparison with the other traffic sources I used:
Digg - 30 visitors in a month;
ViralNetworks (post in the forum) - 20 visits in a month;
LinkedIn (news posting in 2 groups with about 1 mln members) - 18 visits in 2 days;
StumbleUpon - 10 visits in 1 week;
Facebook (I have less than 200 friends there) - 7 visits in a month.

I think LinkedIn performs best from these social sites I tried.

Total of 133 unique visitors in a month. Not a great result, but for the time spent (1 hour to build the tool and 10-15 minutes to post on the social sites) I think it is not bad. If you write an article in 10 minutes and drive this traffic it is great. 10 articles in a month and you have 1000 visitors. If you manage to monetize this traffic then... this is the way to make money on the internet. :-)

Hope you find my experiment and the results useful.

Thanks for reading and wish you luck!

Advertising your business does not have to be a chore anymore, a new wave of advertising opportunities has come upon us.
In the past, advertising your product/service/affiliate program was a hard, costly thing to do. First you would have to search the internet to find competing products to see if you had something unique, then you would have to find linking partners to get some targeted traffic to your site, then you would have to find affiliate/jv partners to send out broadcasts to there lists just so you could get noticed by a few people, people that may not even be your target market.
That seems a lot of work to go through just to get some traffic to your site and maybe get noticed to sell a few units of what you are selling.
So what if there was a new way of advertising?
What if there was a new way of advertising to a targeted audience that is actually interested in what you have to offer?

Well that is where Social Marketing comes in to play.

Social marketing has been creeping up on the few that are "in the know" and that "few in the know" have been marketing there products to thousands of people that are:
1. Targeted
2. In there thousands
3. Actualy interested
4. Looking for a solution to there problem
and
5. Ready to buy the solution to there problem

Take a look at just some of the social networking sites around the internet at the moment, look at myspace.com or youtube.com and you wil realise that these sites have millions of people looking for friends to network with.
There are sections for business, mothers, fathers, pets, money problems and the list goes on and on. Do you see the point im making here?

Social Marketing is the new wave of business advertising and your gonna see a lot more about it in the coming weeks as more and more people jump on it.

The best part about social marketing though is not that you can advertise your business to thousands of people that are looking for your solution but the best part is, its free to do it.
All you need to do is, sign up for a free account, fill out your profile with a few cool free layouts, put some links to your products, banners to your affiliate links and you have started social marketing.
Then you can start adding friends to your network that are looking for your solutions by targeting friend searches, then you can start sending out bulletins to your friends to get some interest in your solutions.

Now, this is only scratching the surface of what can be achieved with social marketing and there is a lot to go through but i think you maybe getting the point that im trying to get accross to you.
There are many social networking websites out there, that have from say, a few thousand members, right upto millions of members and you can advertise to most of them if you just take the time and learn how to do it right.

Article Source : Pg. 353

About Author

Both Stanil Dobrev & Natalie Wilkins are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Stanil Dobrev has sinced written about articles on various topics from Currency Trading, Computers and The Internet and Modelling. Web developer, PHP expert. SEO master and internet marketer. For author's portfolio and useful PHP script please visit . Stanil Dobrev's top article generates over 1900 views. to your Favourites.

Natalie Wilkins has sinced written about articles on various topics from Computers and The Internet, Online Dating and About Web Hosting. Natalie Wilkins has written a report on Social Networking and the the fastest ways to start profiting from it here:. Natalie Wilkins's top article generates over 1000 views. to your Favourites.