Marketing Your Business With Viral Social News Communities

Internet marketing can be a tough gig. It doesn’t come easily and often requires a detailed understanding of how the Internet works. The copious opportunities for social networking only clouds the judgement of marketing agencies.

When first building out your business, it’s important to recognize your branding tactics. The viral marketing techniques used in popular websites work best with memorable headlines. Within communities such as YouTube and Facebook it’s never been easier to get your small business recognized.

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Below I’ve gone into detail about some great marketing techniques for businesses. These generally aren’t one size fits all but can get you looking down the right path. Viral marketing has become a hit which allows information transfer faster than any time period in history!

Control the Flow of Information

As the creator of your company, it’s important you recognize how information flow works. Once bits of info have leaked onto the Internet it’s almost impossible to stop the sweeping current. Important news will spread like wildfire and once it’s out there, there’s no going back.

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If you can manage to control the information then you can push whatever image you’d like. This is a very powerful technique, especially for small businesses and corporations without a solid reputation. It’s worth the effort creating small graphics and banners for your company’s branding. Consider hiring a vector illustrator to design custom effects for your ideas.

Another powerful consideration is running a company blog. With this publishing tool it’s simple getting information onto the web. You may share news about your website updates, company discounts, renovations, nearly anything. It’s also a great sourcing spot for Wiki entries or other article communities such as HubPages.

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If you don’t like the sound of a blog, try installing WordPress as a static website with news updates. There are plenty of free plugins to customize the many pages on your site. It’s also a simple manner of releasing news updates as short posts which gives your business a more corporate feeling. This appeals to the older audience where professionalism goes a long way.

Get Started with Social Media

The umbrella term of social media gets tossed around a lot. This generally includes many networked websites where communities can be created. The best social media websites you’ll want to work with grant you a profile page with your own username, avatar, and profile URL.

For example, when creating a Twitter account, it’s required you set a designated URL. This is the perfect opportunity to create your own branding (ex. http://twitter.com/snogglemedia). This gives your fans a great way to check in with your latest news updates. But Twitter is a monster network rivaled only by Facebook, so there are plenty of other options.

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I recommend also looking into social news communities. Many of the big brands like Digg and Reddit allow signup absolutely free. You’ll get your own URL and username, plus you can submit articles under custom categories. These can range from cooking to economics to politics and badminton. It’s also possible to launch your own niche social news community powered under Pligg CMS.

Share Information

If there’s one thing an audience loves it’s free stuff. Graphic designers especially enjoy vector artwork, icon sets, and website templates. If you’d like to garner traffic and attention Google will become your new best friend. Ranking higher in search engines will net you attention from just the right people.

It is not a requirement that you stick to offering free downloads. If you or your company has great information to share, why not write about it? Or even better, create a short video clip and upload onto YouTube. The network has hundreds of millions of views daily and continues to grow with each passing week.

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If you can record video on your desktop then a brief tutorial isn’t so bad, either. People eat up this kind of material and it really draws a crowd in video communities. Try brainstorming a few ideas on topics you may help teach others. This will greatly vary depending on the type of business you run, but anything digitally-related can create a brilliant tutorial.

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Just ensure that whatever type of information you’ll be offering is valuable to the consumer. Visitors will judge your company based on what information you put out there, good or bad. This is why the control is so important right from the start. Once you lose control of your audience it’s difficult to re-build a reputation.

Build your Digital Network

When building all of these accounts it’s important to never lose sight of your long-term goals. By joining and adding hundreds of friends it’s possible to increase your network by enormous numbers. Some great examples where this technique works includes Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and MySpace.

If you can frequently log into these networks and communicate with your friends, you may find the opportunities even more fulfilling. After all, networking truly is the key to success in literally any business environment. The control and profits you will earn all stem from who you know and what they have to say about you.

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One of the greatest benefits with social media often allows for people to leave comments on your wall or profile page. This allows for other people to view these and get an idea of your business, even without registering with any website. You can interlink these profiles on your company website as possible contact resources.

Conclusion

Although this isn’t an exhaustive list I hope these examples can get your viral marketing campaign rolling. Once you’ve got the whole thing in motion it’s easier to glide along and feign control towards organic marketing.

Building some type of blog or article submission directory will get your company indexed much higher in Google’s search results. I recommend updating daily with Twitter at the very least. Tweets can be indexed by google and also include a unique permalink ID which you can pass along via other media outlets.

Viral marketing isn’t something you can have full control over, and poses more as a potential technique than entire marketing sector. If you follow along building your business’ branding and social media profiles you’ll breeze right along the path of viral markets. If you’ve got any suggestions for marketing campaigns please offer them in the comments field below.