Social Media Marketing: Focus or Scatter?

Most bloggers realize the incredible power of social media marketing to send huge amounts of traffic to their blog in a short period of time. There is no shortage of social media sites available, which can cause some frustration over knowing which ones to use for the best results.

With all of the choices, is it best to focus your social media marketing on one or two sites, or will you get better results with scattered approach that includes a much larger number of social media websites?

Using all (or even many) social media sites effectively is just not possible for most of us. The time requirement for this approach is more than we’re willing to spend. With that in mind, the options are:

1 – Use a wide variety of social media sites without spending significant time on any of them, and hope that your content catches on somewhere that will send a considerable amount of traffic.

2 – Focus on using one or two social media sites effectively and don’t worry about the others.

The reason many bloggers choose the first option is to have a chance at traffic from a lot of different sources rather than putting their eggs all in one basket. However, with the right strategy it is possible to focus your efforts on one or two sites and still get significant traffic from others that you aren’t using.

Why Use a Focused Approach?

1- It’s more productive use of your time. By spreading yourself thin on a lot of different social media sites you’ll be spending a lot of time and you’ll be unlikely to get the best results. A focused approach will allow you to become a “top user” of a particular site, which can bring floods of traffic. Being successful with one social media site will give you much better results than being mediocre at many.

2- You can use sites that are more relevant. Each social media site has it’s own community that prefers a certain type of content, and some only include content on certain niches. If you choose the right social media site to use you can have more success because your content will be more relevant to its audience. Even smaller social sites that are highly focused can bring very high quality traffic.

3- Social media success can snowball. This week I submitted a post, 77 Resources to Simplify Your Life as a Web Designer, to two niche social media sites. By the end of the day it received thousands of visitors from Digg, StumbleUpon, and del.icio.us (and I didn’t submit it to any of these). Many times a popular page at one site will get submitted to others just like this.

4- Tracking your results with 1 or 2 sites is easier than with many. If you’re using every social media site out there it will be extremely difficult to analyze what is working and what is not. With a focused approach you can learn how to effectively market your blog.

How Can You Create a Focused Approach?

1 – Pick the most appropriate sites according to the type of content on your blog.

2 – Optimize your pages for that/those specific social media audiences (buttons and links to submit/bookmark).

3 – Study the particular sites that you are focusing on so you can learn what type of content is most successful.

4 – Cater your writing, content, and headlines toward that specific audience.

If you’ve been using a number of different social media sites and not getting results with any of them, consider changing to a focused approach.