Phil

Thank you for the great input. It offers us a whole new perspective on using Twitter and other social networking sites.

I also thought I would post a real life example to go along with this post. I am promoting a website called WholesaleKeychain.com. Obviously we need to build links for the site to rank well in the search engines, so how can you do that using social media correctly?

We decided to allow some influential sports bloggers to giveaway the keychains! Our only requirement was that the link back to the products they were giving away. How do it do?

Image

You can view the post here to get a better idea on how to format a similar contest: http://www.boltsfromtheblue.com/2009/6/28/928738/looking-for-cool-san-diego

Instead of creating our own Twitter account and trying to create a bunch of fake followers, we just simply created a reason why influential Twitter Account owners would promote the site for us.

If you don’t already have a large group of loyal followers on Twitter or any other social media site, this is an excellent way to use social media effectively today.

Jeff

I am not sure if I posted something similar to this already, but I think it is important to post it anyway. Many people ask me, “As an average Small Business Owner how can I use social media marketing effectively.” Since this topic is about the fastest growing social media site Twitter I think it is good to go over this.

Step 1: Create & publish relevant content, or link bait that links back to internal pages of your site.

Step 2: Influence aggregators & distributors of information to link to your useful content.

Step 3: Convince socializers to inform their large network of social media users (like Twitter) about this great resource he/she just found.

Remember, you want to influence the influencers, not they try to become the influencer overnight. Too many companies fall into the trap on trying to build 1,000’s of “friends” on social media sites instead of influencing the already popular social media users.

There is nothing wrong with becoming a popular social media users (like Evan is) but trying to become that overnight does not work for most internet business owners. So an easy way to use social media marketing now is to create great content and get it into the hands of social media users.