Innovative social media marketing tactics proven to generate buzz
by peggyd • July 22nd • 4 comments
Do you have time to read an 11 page interview that reveals cutting edge social media marketing tactics? No? I didn’t think so. I read it, however, and have summarized three of the best points for you below.
The interview was with whitepaper writer, Michael Stelzner. Last spring Stelzner used innovative social media tactics to market his social media webinar, The Social Media Success Summit. Why I paid attention — he had the best webinar landing page I’d ever seen. Stelzner stood apart from the pack and I wanted to learn more. Why you should pay attention, Stelzner successfully experimented with never-tried social media marketing techniques and shared much of what he learned in this interview.
Three not-to-be missed findings:
Press Releases aren’t dead, but they are changing.
- Start by writing your press release with with keywords in mind.
- Send your press release through a press release distributor, like PRWeb, using their social media version for maximum exposure.
- Bloggers, looking for content, will see your release through Google or Yahoo news alerts. And, if your content is good, they’ll write about it in their blogs. Stelzner calls bloggers “citizen journalists.”
- Consumers are also increasingly using news alerts to track subjects they are interested in. Your release goes straight to these consumers.
- While Stelzner did publicize his event directly to Mashable and Technorati, he said it wasn’t worth the time it took. His impression is that these sources are more likely to cover an event when they discover it for themselves.
Build a network of influential people to help you spread the buzz about your event.
- Twitter works to spread news in a viral fashion through retweets. Each time you have a link retweeted by someone else it is seen by a much broader audience AND you increase the number of impressions of your message in your core audience.
- When several people share the same story all during the same time period, it is more likely to be noticed.
- Put these people in place ahead of time and incorporate spreading the news though them into your PR plan.
Auto-launching video on your landing page helps people “stick” on your page longer.
- People learn different ways: some people will read, but others want to listen. Listening draws the scanning reader deeper into the content, more quickly.
- Stelzner is so convinced that video works to keep people to keep people sticking around longer, he hasn’t done an A/B test to prove it. He doesn’t want to lose sales by not including video.
- If you are opposed to auto-launching video because of concern about negative customer reaction, he suggests testing video that shows people talking, but you don’t hear the audio unless you mouse over it.
There are tons of other great tactics covered in the article. If you decide you have time to read all 11 pages, I hope you’ll drop back here and let me know what you found to be the best idea of the bunch or what he’s missed. After all, as Michael Stelzner and Twitter founder, Biz Stone, have both said – social media marketing is so new that nobody has totally figured it out yet.