Social bookmarking

[PeterAlexLeigh]

What does the forum think the best strategy for social bookmarking is?

Obviously white hat, user generated would be preferable but looking slightly darker; you can obviously get services that create social bookmarks over a period of several weeks, but are they worth the investment?

[thepersuader]

What an interesting answer, for somebody to give you an actual working and working reply is fantastic. To be perfectly honest I just tend to keep my head down and work on my own websites and do a little bit of social media because I enjoy it.and It seems to working for me.

[PeterAlexLeigh]

Ross - Great answer with some good ideas that I should be able to put into practice. Thanks for taking the time to write it!

[rtavs]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for the compliments. I am writing it up as we speak

[rtavs]

Hi Keri,

Thank you for your reply. I will get to work and draft up an article and send it on to you for editing.

[KeriMorgret]

Agreed! This could be the basis of a great YouMoz article. Send us an email at editor@seomoz.org if you're interested and I can help you with a few ideas.

[RyanKent]

What an incredible reply. This would be a great SEOmoz blog article!!

[rtavs]

Hi Shelly,

First of all let me say: I feel your pain.

I used to be the SEO for an injury claims company. Spammy as hell. Terrible reputation (ambulance chasers). Not fun to talk about on social networks. BUT all that being said I got a bit creative and this is what I ended up doing to get them rank on the first page for some competetive fat head terms.

1. Great Content

I hate to say it but this is serously the bedrock of a good campaign.

The thing that was the most successful was to create "ask the expert" videos and send them off to the Universities. The idea being if any student had a Law related question we would film a video with the answer for them. When doing this type of programme it is important to massage the ego of the person who interacted with you so they retweet it and share it with friends. So mention who they are, where they are from and compliment them on asking a great question.

Then@reply them when the video is uploaded so they can see you have answered there question. Remember to put in calls to action on your content if neccesarry- TELL them to follow you on twitter, FB, Youtube, etc.

Then I decided to harness the power of the followers we gained by setting up a competition. We wanted the outcome of the competition to be

• more links
• more social shares
• more great content

Therefore we offered an internship competition where the students would win a job based solely on there social netwroks. Firstly they had to write a blog post about the industry. The top 10 were picked and posted on the company corporate blog (free content ftw), the students were then told the finalists would be the people who got the most retweets, FB likes and Diggs. (Getting other people to promote you ftw).

As this was happening we were busy writing away to newspapers, bloggers and PR sites to get this cool new internship opportunity talked about this gained us a ton of links and buzz around the competition.

When we counted up the first round of shares for all contestants we got around 800 in total likes and shares. From here we picked the top 3 to make videos saying why they should win the competition. And again the video winners we the ones with the most retweets and shares, etc.

All while this was happening we were meeting with the university PR teams and stroking there egos to get them to help there own students by publically blogging about it on there university websites. (Handfull of PR 6/7 domain link anyone? Thank you very much).

1b.

Another great content idea was to get creative with the industry and make an infographic of the most gruesome personal injury claims made. It went down a storm on the social web after sharing it on reddit and stumble upon. (what is it about gore the internet jsut loves?)

You have to also submit it to websites for design that talk about the best infographics,etc. Very nice way to get easy links.

c. General News and Blog Posts about your industry

Ok lets face it. Consumers are not going to readily share your content about a new loan product that is on the market. But you know who will? Other people in your industry. Get on twitter (or use follower wonk) and search for everyone inyou industry and follow them. Retweet there content  and DM them and start interacting. You will be sureprised the number of people that will share your stuff. Industry watch dogs and official bodies can be very good to interact with.

d. Make a Facebook iFrame site.

This gives you a mini website on Facebook. Then you will want to fire up some ads on Facebook ads and drive sometraffic to it. make the message compelling. make the mini site interesting abd you will get pleasnty of likes.Make sure to put a contact form with a standard thank you page after the form so you acn track the conversions in analytics.

Also, go search for lists and blog posts about companies making use of social media and send in your site as a recommendatino to them.

e.Nurture your audience

Give them things to do on Facebook. Make up a quiz. Or conduct a poll or survey. Make a game about buying a loan. Anything that someone can waste 5 minutes on. As soon as they interact with your content it is shared on their wall meaning all there friends see it and get you more shares and likes.

f. Become a content aggregator (of sorts) on Twitter.

SUbscribe via Google reader to all the blogs in your industry that are of interest to you.(Alltop is great for finding interesting blogs)

Then wake up on moday morning. Fire up Hootsuite (a twitter client). And set it up to post links to you favourite content every 4-5 hours over the next week make sure to CC the user in to you tweet so they see you promoting there content.

This will get you Retweets and followers of your own. Over time you naturally start to become an authority and can start to pepper in your own content and get it shared by the masses. On top of this you are creating realtionships with other content creators. So when you feel the time is right start to DM people and ask about there site and if they would be interested in you writing an article for your site. Much easier than cold outreach techniques.

Other

We also started creating web apps for people to use and lef t a branded link in the corner of the app. One was a find a lawyer in your area app which pulled in Google Maps/Places data from their API then pulled in review data to compare them.

In a nutshell

Just make cool stuff and tell people about it. No body cares that the new loan product has X% over 3 years. But they do care that the biggest bank loan ever recorded was $52 Bazillion which was used by an eccentric rich guy to make clones of Rand Fishkin which were used at SEO presentations all over the world so he could be a two places at the same time.Make it fun and it will gain shares and links. Put it infron of people and tell them about it. Email them, Tweet Them, Shout at them in the street- anything to get the voice heard.

PS: Don't buy any social shares or bookmarks. It is so easy to tell if there is no one behind a social profile, just think of all the footprints a real user leaves vs a robot. IFf we can see it so can the search engines. They are run by billionaires with computer science PHDs. I don't know about you but I wouldn't want to go up against them in a pub quiz nevermind manipulate the algo they have created.

Hope That Helps.

[PeterAlexLeigh]

Nice. Thanks Anthony, that'll be my day's reading

[PeterAlexLeigh]

Surely you need to promote the post though otherwise no one is ever going to find it. What's the best way for doing that?

Paid stumbles, tweets?

[AnthonyMangia]

I think you should check this article out by Rand Fishkin.  He goes into detail about some companies in very BORING industries that have managed to develop incredibly successful link bait.

[RyanKent]

ok, granted but how would you drive people to whatever the interesting story is that we post via. social?

The post IS the driver.

You need to offer content that is interesting and compelling enough. That is the key.

Read Reddit &StumbleUpon and see which articles rise to the top. The title is short but attracts attention. The first sentence has to pull people in and have them want to read more. If your article is compelling enough to get others to read past the first sentence, then you have people's attention and it's up to your story to do the rest.

[PeterAlexLeigh]

ok, granted but how would you drive people to whatever the interesting story is that we post via. social?

I suppose, putting grey hat areas side, I'm looking for the quickest way to boost 'social' visibility.

[RyanKent]

Social media is possible in EVERY industry. I recently saw a story of how a company offered "high class" portable toilets for weddings and other events.

What all the new stories and try to offer content and feedback which ties in your site to popular news. Focus on the benefits of your service. Perhaps "Joe" was stuck. He had a job offer but his car was unreliable. With the help of blacklistedloans.com Joe was able to obtain a loan, he bought a new car, got the job and recently was promoted. All this was possible thanks to blacklistedloans.com. A nice human interest story which can be hyped a bit.

Your About page doesn't mention how long you have been in business. Have you ever asked for feedback from a client who has paid off a loan? If not, you may be missing a fantastic opportunity for a glowing testimonial.

[PeterAlexLeigh]

Thanks Anthony - Not what I was hoping for, but guess white hat is the only way!

[PeterAlexLeigh]

Ryan,

Yes, I totally agree with what you're saying. It's a little harder in my industry as it's a loan site and to be honest it's fairly hard to create content for people to get too excited about, especially given the ongoing economic impact and stricter eligibility on financial products.

Also, if you've got any tips to generate twitter/social followers of a site it would be greatly received.

Ideally I wouldn't talk about grey/black hat areas at all and I didn't expect to get responses promoting social bookmarking services - guess I was hoping for a 'quick win'

[RyanKent]

Hi Shelly,

The entire idea of "getting social" is generating content that others WANT to tell their friends about. You didn't mention your business type so I will use Will's as an example. He runs a menswear (fashion) site. I would keep an eye out on fashion related news and magazines. When you see a star wearing a hat, shirt or any other item which is either being offered on your site, or has a similar product offered, it's time to get social!

If Tom Cruise is wearing your shirt, then reference the image of him wearing it and write an article about it. Don't write your average "I need a 500 word internet article" blurb, but instead go for making the best article ever written! Try to be catchy, engaging, informative, etc. "Tom Cruise Knows Fashion" is a possible title. The content could contain something like "Do you want to dress like a star? You may want to buy something from the xyz line proudly offered by mensfashion.com".

When the article is done, be sure the social icons are in place and publish it. The next step is to let the world know about your article. It's up to you to decide how to best publicize the article in a quality way without seeming spammy. The twitter and facebook pages of fashion magazines, channels like E!, etc. are all potential targets.

@Will, I believe most of the above works to answer your questions as well.

could you define social bookmarking?

Social Bookmarking

[WillBlackburn]

Hi Anthony,

When you say top quality content, what do you mean?

I run a designer menswear e-commerce site, currently have 2700+ friends on the page, yesterday I started a LIKE page about the company as well, only 20 likes so far.

What can I produce on these sites to get the LIKEs etc..? Is it just a case of posting good posts and including links to my site or a mixture of good posts and good linking posts?

I find that we put up 1-2 posts a day with a link to a maybe the new stock arrivals etc... but no text to follow it.

What would be the best way of getting the most out of facebook/twitter?

Also could you define social bookmarking?

Thanks

Will

[AnthonyMangia]

Probably not.  I've tried it all, from paying for social bookmarks to just submitting content and hoping for clicks.  What I've found is that if your content is truly quality, it's not going to need links to pick up steam and get shared.  A little nudge to your Twitter followers should be sufficient.  If an article sucks, buying 100 thumbs ups or diggs isn't going to really get it any exposure.  These things tend to balance themselves out - high quality content always rises to the top.