Social Media Websites and Viral Marketing

For those who are new to social media websites, these are sites that enable the readers to vote on popular news/stories, or allow users to bookmark and share interesting web pages and media such as photos, videos and journals. Some of the most popular social media sites are Digg, Reddit, Netscape, Del.icio.us, Furl, Shadows, StumbleUpon, MySpace, YouTube, and Ma.gnolia.com.

These social media websites focus around social topics of discussion, which may or may not have any commercial side. One thing these sites have in common is the desire to share. And, that is what makes them ideal for viral marketing. In the SEO world, viral media creation and marketing – often called link baiting – is increasingly becoming popular. If you can write stories/articles which arouse readers’ curiosity or offer them something that they want, the readers will share your story with others – resulting in a viral effect.

Social media sites thus offer a place for putting your ‘quality content’ where others can notice it; if your content (story) becomes popular with the community users, it will appear high on the lists these social media sites produce. Appearing on the top page of these lists is fast becoming the new search engine marketing (SEM).

Though viral marketing using social media websites can attract lot of direct traffic to your website, such traffic rarely makes any sales or results into subscribers. This is because the profile of the community users who vote for your story may not always match with that of your ideal customers. However, this kind of linkbaiting can create amazing indirect benefits as follows.

1) If your story goes to the top of such social media websites, it can give you hundreds or thousands of valuable inbound links in a few days.

2) Increased inbound link popularity will help your site to rank high in search engines.

3) People will remember your site and thus it can help you in building your brand.

4) Google will make your site more authoritative because of the natural link profile of such inbound links.

Thus, viral marketing using social media websites can be the fastest, cheapest and effective way of building incoming links.