How to develop a brand identity for your blog ? part 10

Let there be light… But Which Company?

If you missed my earlier posts of the series, here they are: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Post 8 and Post 9. And here goes part 10:

We all talk about implementing social networks in our online marketing mix. However, the main intention of a lot of marketers is to promote the content or get more links via them. There is nothing wrong in it. If you can use social networks to promote a viral content, there is nothing like it.

But don’t stop there. Let’s move a few steps ahead. Or let’s think about it from a different perspective.

What happens when one of your pages flies high in a social network?

You get thousands of page views in no time. And you feel very happy about that.

That’s great – but what else? It takes a lot of hard work or just great ideas and good luck to fly high in a social network. And most of the blogs are one post wonders (leave alone the big brands – they have bigger brand names to hit the front page even for no reason).

Did you ever receive huge traffic flow from any social network? What happened next? How many comments did you receive? How many pages did those people visit before leaving the blog? Was there any change in the amount of email subscribers or feed subscribers? Is there any change in the amount of returning visitors? How many quality links did you receive via that page?

These are some of the parameters that can help you to find out the actual return on investment – time and effort you spent to develop that content.

A lot of bloggers and webmasters simply publish a story and bookmark it in the social network and wait for the story hit the top page. (BTW, some of them spend sleepless nights with fingers crossed.)

If you really want to get the most out of those social networks, create your micro network with the power users of that social network. Develop a natural relationship and promote their content. If you are smart than use them to promote your content – you will hit the front page in more than one occasion.

And continuous presence in social networks would actually develop your brand.