Search Marketing Blog
SMX Social Media Marketing – Linkbait – Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
Posted by Kent Schnepp on 04.22.2008
The next session at SMX Social Media Marketing in Long Beach, California is titled “Linkbait – Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites“. the presenters are Brent Csutoras of BrentCsutoras.com, Jane Copland from SEOmoz, and Cameron Olthuis from Factive Media.
Jane Copland kicked things off by presenting several good tactics for creating relevant “linkbait”.
- Envision potential industry oddities.
- Consider the issues faced by your potential customers.
- Encourage the use of relevant keywords.
- Present your regular content, but in a creative, unique way.
In my experience several of these are effective, even when conducting a social media campaign for a conservative client. Jane also touched on the main goal of a social media campaign, which is to attract attention. With attention comes links, traffic, and brand awareness.
Jane ended with the following:
- The goal of linkbait is to attract attention and not all attention is positive. So monitor your comments.
- Of her dozen real life examples seven of them were found by Reddit and StumbleUpon.
- Great linkbait will usually perform well, if it doesn’t at least it’s fresh relevant content.
Next up was Brent Csutoras on social media linkbait tactics. Brent started off discussing the purpose of social media marketing which he stated is the following:
- Attract Links
- Increase Traffic
- Improve Visibility
Brent then presented five different categories of linkbait which he finds effective.
- Top Ten Lists – This tactic was extremely 12-6 months ago, but is starting to die down. Try to mix up your lists and combine them with other categories.
- Offbeat or Extreme Stories – According to Brent these are always effective. However, they are sometimes difficult to get approved by campaign shareholders.
- How-To Information – These campaigns have to by accurate and worthwhile. Make sure you research your target audience.
- Current Events – This type of social media campaign tends to be somewhat short lived. Make sure you post quickly.
- Images & Videos – Image & video campaigns seem to perform faster then content based campaigns.
Brent’s tips for crafting a linkbait:
- Research – What works? What fails? Use RSS feeds, search engines, communities. Develop good content ideas through comprehensive research.
- Title & Description – Create simple, strong, and focused titles and descriptions. Numbers are often effective.
- Interact & Share -It helps to be active in your targeted social media community. Continue to monitor and participate in comments made by the community.
Next, Cameron Olthuis presented “Tips On Submitting Content”.
Cameron discussed the following:
- Power Accounts – Try to develop or locate a power account to submit your campaigns.
- Time – Tuesday through Thursday around 10:00am – 10:30am (PST) seem to be the best times. Don’t ever submit on Fridays.
- Titles & Descriptions- Extremely important. Discussed in detail by Brent above.
- Categories – Make sure you submit to the most relevant category.
- Images & Videos – Use images and videos as much as possible. Linkbait performs better with images and video.
- Leverage Your Network – Don’t be afraid to ask your peers to vote on a post. Just don’t spam them.
It’s time for lunch! Following lunch is a presentation on social news media sites titled “Extra! Extra! the Social News Sites“. Come back soon!
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