Over the last few months, I've been very tempted to kill both my MySpace and Facebook accounts.
I was sick of responding to the seemingly endless ‘friend requests', mostly from internet marketers whose idea of friendship was to spam the heck out of my account with sales messages. I wasn't particularly keen to waste my time reading the ‘let's get together, baby' messages or viewing scantily clad women. Duh.
Overall, I just wasn't seeing the value of these social networking sites — but to be fair, I wasn't really actively participating to make them work to my advantage, either.
The video I watched this morning has me reconsidering the value of using social media sites as a marketing tool, however.
The 50 minute video “Social Marketing – There Are No Secrets” video by Don Crowther is the latest one in StomperNet's “Going Natural” series, which are some of the best quality production videos I've seen in the Internet marketing arena — not to mention entertaining and informative.
Don got my attention right from the start of the video by saying, “Forget SEO!“, a statement about search engine optimization that echoes the opinion I've always held and shared with my readers.
He also explains how you can still get ‘first mover advantage‘ if you start using social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and social bookmarking sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon now — and estimates that the window of opportunity on this marketing channel will start to close within the next 12 to 18 months.
The video shows how the Stompernet boys managed to claim the first 8 PAGES on Google (yes, pages, not listings) through social media marketing.
OK, that opened my eyes to the possibilities of using Web 2.0 (a.k.a. social networking, social marketing, social media) sites to build traffic and sales for your online business.
Don also shows results from research studies that demonstrates how traffic from social networking sites is actually more valuable than traffic we might get from ppc and other marketing techniques. Nice…
I think it's a worthwhile view and have posted the video below for you to view. Access to the other StomperNet videos is available through the playlist on video player. The Stompernet boys are also giving away a free 33-page social marketing strategy guide called “SMARTS”.
Watch it… you might find yourself reconsidering or adopting the social media marketing strategy it you do. 🙂
[tags]social marketing,stompernet,don crowther,brad fallon,andy jenkins[/tags]