A lot of people just don’t seem to be able to figure out the whole social media thing. I hear a lot of folks tell me that they just cannot understand why their blog posts only get one Digg or why nobody retweets them. It seems to be a common problem. But there are often recurring issues with how they are going about it. Here are the ones that pop up most and should be rectified if you really want to get traction online via social networking sites.
1) You Don’t Have Any Friends – The first clue should be that “social media” has the word “social” in it. If you don’t have friends on Digg, then who is going to digg your stuff? If you don’t have friends on Twitter, then who is going to see your stuff to retweet it? On Twitter you need lots of friends. On Digg and Stumbleupon you need the right type of friends (more on that later).
2) You Are a Bad Friend – Do you just jump on Digg and submit every post you make? Is your Twitter account simply an auto-generated list of your latest blog posts? If so then you are probably a bad friend. You need to be actively HELPING other people with their stuff. You need to be actively Digging, thumbing and retweeting the stuff that your friends are submitting. That is what a friend does. Remember the “social” part of social media. I have a few friends who vote for every single thing I submit on Twitter, Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit and Propeller without fail. I love those guys and look after them in return.
3) You Are a Hermit – Hermits are not social. To be good at social media you need to be social (spotting a theme here yet?). A big tip here is to sign up with AIM, MSN and GTalk (Organise them all with Pidgin or Adium) and then list your IMs on your social media accounts. Most people who are good at social media are big IMers. Make it easy to contact you this way and you will start to make friends with other folks who are going the social media route and can offer (and need) help. Help each other out on IM.
4) You Don’t Have the Right Type of Friends – Are you retweeting, thumbing up or digging every single thing your friends are sending into the social media landscape but they never do the same thing for you? If that continues on longer than about a month, then drop them. It’s that simple. They don’t know how the game is played (ie. you help each other) and there are plenty of people out there who do and who want to be friends with others who know how to play. Your job is to find those people.
5) You Submit Rubbish – Content is KING. You just cannot get around that fact. The most popular social media user in the world cannot get crap to go popular. Be honest with yourself – is your content up to scratch? Is it the best it can be? Have you used great titles? Is it easily scannable? Have you used bullet points and lists? How about sub-headings? Is there an awesome graphical element to your posts or page? If not, then go back to the drawing board and get your content right.
None of this is particularly easy – in fact, if you’re doing it well then it’s probably a hell of a lot of hard work. Competition is tough, but it also makes you better at what you do in both producing content and promoting it. And that will mean that you beat out the competition.
