Social media marketing, while its concept and fundamentals have been around for a while, has changed remarkably in the past six months. There was a time when a social media link building campaign was very easy. The big search engines valued domains like Squidoo and MySpace to the extent that your profiles could easily rank for targeted keywords. It should come as no surprise that this is no longer the case.

Using social media as an effective link building tactic is still possible but it is no longer as easy as creating profiles, submitting content to social news sites and dominating search engine results pages. It is both fortunate and unfortunate that Google has severely toughened up its standards for sites like MySpace. For marketers, it means a lot more work. For users, it means far less noise and spam in their search results.

Social media optimization is now a relatively delicate process. Traditional link building campaigns often involve blatantly asking for links, or simply buying them. In contrast, social media optimization is only effective if a marketer can convince others to link to material, not by asking, but by creating fantastic content. Most people’s accounts and profiles on social media websites are intrinsically attached to their offline self. Unlike people who run a website that includes a designated “Links” page, social media users are not likely to add a company’s profile as a “friend” or vote for a company’s content just because they’re asked to. The majority of people want their user history on sites like Digg and Reddit, and their friend lists on MySpace and Facebook to reflect something about their personalities. The less socially appealing and more exploited your industry is offline, the harder it will be for you to take advantage of online communities.

The landscape of social media is constantly changing. There is no profile, site or community whose content does not change hourly or, at the most, daily. “Traditional” social media link building, in most respects, was solely spam. Marketers realized that they could get quick, easy non-nofollowed links out of domains whose authority had already been established. There was little need to build a community and, in actual fact, a company who created a spam profile for the sake of linking to their actual websites would not have wanted to attract a great deal of traffic to the profile itself. The primary goal was to have search engine spiders see the profile and the links, add the weight of the links to the authority of the company’s main website and improve the main website’s ranking.

Search engines no longer lend any value whatsoever to links from areas like MySpace profiles. This is not to say, however, that MySpace and its peers are completely useless now; it just means that optimizing with these sites is no longer the simple process it was a few years ago. Search engines and social media website owners alike are aware that the point of social media is not to simply give marketers an easy collection of links. Marketers must now be prepared to contribute to the communities that can send them traffic.

This article documents the procedures and practices that should be followed in order to enjoy the benefits of today’s largest social media entities. With the detailed instructions of how marketers can best optimize these sites, we have also included the quickest, easiest ways to create accounts and add links to other sites. We provide this not because we advocate creating profiles, adding links and not following up with the community in any way, but as a time-saving guide when one is faced with creating multiple profiles across different sites.

Some General Rules

1. When dealing with social media, you may have to leave your political or moral beliefs behind. For some reason, a high percentage of users at the most popular social media outlets are of a liberal or libertarian persuasion and they tend to join groups and vote on stories accordingly.
2. In general, people are a lot more wary about social spam now than they were three years ago. Even legitimate yet misguided marketing efforts can be taken as spam by users.
3. The widespread adoption of the nofollow tag, which tells search engines not to put any value in tagged links, means that marketers need to appeal to communities as a whole instead of simply taking advantage of sites’ domain strength.
4. Buying votes to gain popularity for submissions on social media websites is even more frowned upon than is buying links in order to rank well in search engines. However, search marketers and webmasters ask their friends, acquaintances and business associates for links all the time. They ask total strangers for links via link submission forms and unsolicited emails. Asking for votes in social media is fine – people have the right to decide your content is not to their liking and not to vote for it. However, when someone has bought a link or a vote, there is no social discretion. Money should never change hands in the social media world.
5. Every community is different, even if the same people use a number of different communities. People do not behave the same way at LinkedIn as they do at MySpace; neither do they look for the same content at Del.icio.us as they do whilst browsing on StumbleUpon. Every social media effort has to take the intended audience into account.
6. Even if you have the most compelling content on the Internet, an ugly website, boring Blogspot layout or even a questionable color-scheme can hinder your success with social media. Search engines mightn’t be able to see an ugly background or a slow-loading image, but people can, and they take into account factors like these when deciding whether or not you get their vote.
7. People can be very mean. Social media is a popularity contest of sorts and people love to bring down things that are popular. When your content receives a lot of attention on a prominent website, there will be those who add nasty comments. Consider those comments as part of your success, because rarely do users bother commenting on content that is receiving no attention.
8. Timing can be important. When submitting content to sites like Reddit and Digg, it is not a good idea to do so when it is the middle of the night in the United States. The U.S. is the main source of traffic for sites like this and you will generally notice the best results if your content is gaining votes during the United States’ work day and Europe’s evening.

   Although good content can become popular at any time, a good rule to follow is that intellectual submissions that require a user to think are better off being posted on Monday through Wednesday night or Thursday-day. Less-thought provoking submissions can be posted on Thursday evening, Friday and during the weekend. We once recorded a phenomenal link bait success over a Friday-Saturday time period, but the post was just an interesting picture. Few users are in the mood for political or economic discussion at three in the afternoon on a Friday.