Beginners guide to social media strategies

Stage 1 – Research

The first stage of a successful social media strategy should involve identifying industry-related areas of the web that will provide opportunities to create a buzz online for your client's industry. These include looking at niche social bookmarking sites, blogs, forums, and social networking sites. You should have records kept on file of what sites work well for which industries, this will save you time in the long run, this file will eventually get very large (trust me!).

Stage 2 – Registrations

Once sites have been identified that meet the project criteria the long registration process entering clients' details in profiles takes place. This will usually involve entering a “homepage” URL, company logo, and a brief summary of what the company’s goals are. Any additional promotional material would also be useful to help build up the brand within the different communities.

Stage 3 – Building trust

The key to creating a successful social media strategy is the relationships you build and the trust that you earn. When suggesting sites or information it should not immediately be the client's site or link bait, it should consist of industry related material. Commenting on related blogs, starting forum threads about the industry should also be created. This should be maintained for a period of time before moving on to the next stage. You should take a genuine interest what you comment on and write about, no-one likes a fibber!

Stage 4 – Release link bait

Once there is a level of trust associated with the company profile that is the time when the link bait or URLs should be posted. Using this method will ensure that the information that is posted will not be labeled as spam by the various site administrators or site owners. By this time the profiles created will already hold some weight within the various communities which will ensure a level of traffic.

Stage 5 – Generate traffic + links

Once the URLs and link bait have been posted this should immediately create incoming traffic to the client’s site or landing page. The secondary goal of such a strategy or possibly primary goal depending on the client will be the natural links generated as a result of such a strategy. If like-minded users find the linkbait interesting then by all accounts they should then bookmark the link on their own social media site, be it a blog, social bookmarking site, or forum. This will additionally create more incoming traffic to the site and generate a number of links that will help with the client's search engine positions for selected keywords.

Stages 3, 4, and 5 should be maintained over a longer period of time to keep impacting the search engine results positions. If this is not repeated throughout an extended time period then the increase in search engine positions will only be temporary.