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, https://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.