More Letters Of The Social Media Alphabet

Last week, Neil Patel wrote an article about the social media alphabet. It gave a brief overview of Digg, Netscape, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. While Neil did a great job of covering the social news sites, I wanted to chime in and cover some of the other letters of the alphabet that should be considered when planning a social media marketing campaign: Delicious, Flickr, MySpace and YouTube

D Is For Delicious

Delicious (formally spelled del.icio.us because of its URL, http://del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking site for storing, sharing, and discovering new websites. The main purpose of Delicious is for storing your bookmarks online instead of in your browser. This is so you can access them from any computer, share your bookmarks publicly, and find others with the same interests.

Bookmarks are sorted and organized by tags that are assigned by the person bookmarking the link; there is no limit on the number of tags that can be assigned to each bookmark. Delicious was founded in 2003 and was acquired by Yahoo in 2005 for an undisclosed amount rumored to be in the $15-$30 million range.

If enough people bookmark your site or page it will land on the Delicious popular page, which can result in thousands of visitors and links coming in to your site. The key to getting on the Delicious popular page is creating remarkable content that appeals to the demographic on Delicious.

The best way to see which topics appeal to Delicious users is by looking at the Delicious tag cloud, the bigger the font size the more popular the topic. As with anything, creating the content alone is not enough, it also needs to be seen by others. This can be facilitated by including "add to del.icio.us" buttons or links on your website and in your RSS feeds.

F Is For Flickr

Flickr is a photo-sharing site that lets users upload, view, and share photos. Users can leave comments, subscribe to other photos, and add photos to their favorites list. Flickr also has user profile pages, the ability to connect with friends, and messaging capabilities. Flickr was founded in 2004 and was also acquired by Yahoo in 2005 for an undisclosed amount that was rumored to be in the $30-$35 million range.

Flickr is a great tool for creating brand/product awareness, educating consumers, getting product feedback, and connecting with customers. But even though Flickr is a good marketing tool, it is not something that usually comes to mind when thinking about social media marketing. In addition to sharing screenshots, event photos, and product images on Flickr, you can also include links and write ups that are relevant to the images posted. Chris Silver Smith recently had some good tips on picking up traffic from Flickr you might want to check out.

M Is For MySpace

MySpace is currently the most popular social networking site that lets users create their own profile pages where they can share information about themselves and their interests including blogs, pictures, videos, and music. Users can connect with their friends, leave comments on profiles, join groups, instant message with each other, and send mail & bulletins. MySpace was founded in 2003 and was sold to News Corporation two years later for $580 million.

Due to the massive audience and young demographic that is active on MySpace, it has become a popular place for marketers and advertisers alike. It is has been used by big brands for exposure and also as a way to engage with their potential customers. There are a number of different options for marketing on MySpace that includes profile pages, songs, videos, and popular widgets.

Weird Al Yankovic has released 12 albums in 30 years and for the first time ever his latest album "Straight Outta Lynwood" debuted in the top 10 on the Billboard 200. Yankovic, who personally manages his own MySpace profile now has over 400,000 friends and attributes much of this album’s success to MySpace.

Y Is For YouTube

YouTube is a video-sharing site that lets users view, upload, and share video clips. Users can rate videos, leave comments, subscribe to channels, and add videos to their favorites list. There are also a number of social features that include profile pages, connecting with friends, messaging friends, and commenting on user profiles. YouTube was founded in early 2005 and recently acquired by Google for $1.65 billion.

Marketers generally use YouTube as a way to create buzz for their products, services, and/or company. For a relatively low cost, marketers can create a video and then upload it to YouTube for free, which serves as a platform with a ready audience of millions of people. Having access to an audience of that size gives videos the chance of becoming viral. This can generate a lot of buzz for products and companies.

One example of a successful YouTube campaign is about Picco Z, a radio controlled helicopter that was recently YouTubed. Only two weeks after posting a video to YouTube, one retailer of the product sold over 18,000 of these toy helicopters.

Conclusion

As social media continues to increase in popularity, as marketers, it is important to get familiar with the various social media sites and to discover how to best leverage them for marketing campaigns. In addition to creating buzz, social media marketing is also great for branding, links, traffic, and increased sign ups and sales.

Cameron Olthuis is director of marketing and design for ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.