Social media sphere always confuses marketers with one simple truth – you can’t buy attention. Behind this simple postulate there is an essence of any social media activity. Hereby you don’t have to learn how to do social media marketing; you have to learn how to be social. We all know that there are top social media websites that aggregate tons of traffic, improve your brand recognition and help you build a strong community.
Today we are going to share with you some of our friends' experience in social media promotion. So in case you're considering promoting your design blog, this real life experience will be truly priceless for you. Web design is very unique sphere and it has many peculiarities.
So, let’s start our social media journey and below you’ll find short expositions concerning the most popular social media networks. We’ve tried to be active social media players on most of these resources and first of all we must warn you that you should always carry out some intelligence because each and every social network has its own unique rules, users’ habits and some hidden tricks. The article is aimed at informing you about obstacles that you may face while doing some social media promo campaigns for your web design-related project. The very first rule that's crucial for all is reading terms of use on any website that you are going to register account with.
Reddit.com
Since the days that Digg v.4 has been released Reddit community has quickly succeeded to become number one social network on the web. Web designers should be interested in posting their stories and questions to such threads as /r/web_design , /r/Design/ and /r/webdesign/. These are the most appropriate threads on Reddit where you can post requests to review your designs, search a freelance job, discuss latest news and of course submit various interesting web design related links. Please notice that you shouldn’t promote only your domain because that would be considered to be a spam. Also Redditors don’t like various round-ups, collections and other similar stuff so you may want to avoid this type of content. Be careful and try to become a part of reddit’s design community instead of just submitting your blog content there to get some traffic.
StumbleUpon.com
This is one of the world’s biggest social networks (maybe even the biggest one today) that is also known as the source of the most long-lasting traffic. Actually this is one of the best social networks because it doesn't have any known manipulation tools, so what you get there is genuine and not force-fed. Actually it is hard to promote web design related content on StumbleUpon.com. If you want to become a good stumbler – you should diversify your discoveries, stumbles and comments. The more various trustworthy domains you have in your account history the more Stumble juice you will be able to receive in future. I’m not a huge fan of “sharing” strategy, but it is the easiest way to show your story to other stumblers. It is hard to identify the most appropriate type of content for this social network – so just choose only high quality content and soon you’ll get good results.
Twitter.com
Some people assume that Twitter can hardly be called an actual social network and claim that it's just an online news service. But we still believe that Twitter has the evident social aspect in delivering information, so there is something to count on while trying to promote your content there. Now let’s talk about business. First of all don’t forget to put a tweet button to all of your posts – that's a passive part of Twitter marketing. The hardest thing is the active part - your main objective on Twitter is to build a strong and efficient community, that takes a lot of time and efforts. Following various accounts is only the first step on the long road of Twitter promotions. You have to choose your tweeting strategy. For example you can tweet only your links, you can interact with your followers in various discussions, make thousands of retweets, and so on. It is hard to find the exact formula of success – “trial and errors” is the most efficient method for this.
Facebook.com
Oh yeah, his majesty Facebook! All marketers in the world are dreaming about finding the key to the world’s largest social network. Actually, high quality content and controversial posts are the best things that you can promote on Facebook. Technically you have to consider adding Facebook like button to your website or create your own business page on Facebook, or at least create a Facebook group. After everything is done you should put some efforts in the recruitment process. The more Facebook users you’ll engage talk about your content or just share link from your website, the better results you’ll achieve. What you have to be careful about here is not to allow users regret that they've joined your group of liked your page - don't post too many posts there, otherwise people will get tired and will leave the group. 5 posts per day is just enough.
Design social networks
I’m sure that you’ve heard about DesignBump.com, TheWebBlend.com and DesignFloat.com, haven’t you? These three are great examples of design-targeted social networks. Well, here you should find some other social media enthusiasts that are also in web design and support each other on these websites. Traffic from these websites is not as huge as you may expect, but c’mon - that's still a traffic that you're after. Another great thing about these networks is that here you can find potential partners for the links exchange, cross-promotion campaigns etc.
So, it was a part of our experience in the social media sphere. Of course there are many other interesting websites that we all should try to use. It would be great if you shared your own thoughts about social media promotions experience in the web design sphere. What is your favorite network? Are there any particular tips and tricks that you think can help in social media promotion and that you have tried yourself? Anyways, we are waiting for your thoughts and comments.