Is Content Being Dethroned By Social Media?
Posted on July 21, 2007 by
Adie 
Social Media 
15 Comments
If you’ve been reading this blog in the last couple of days, you know I’ve been talking about the importance of having unique, quality, remarkable content. A well-known internet marketing slogan is “Content is king.” But is content being dethroned by social media?
Social media sites like Digg, Reddit, Netscape, Del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon are changing the online business game. These sites drive huge amounts of traffic. And all you need is good content and a lot of friends. Notice I did not say great content.
On Netscape I saw one blog hit the front page multiple times. Virtually every post on the blog made the front page. I read some of the posts. A few were great quality while the rest were merely good.
How did the blogger make the front page with his (or her) posts? Simple. He participated in the Netscape community. And through his participation, he made a lot of Netscape friends that voted for his posts.
This bring us to the key to social media marketing. Friends. The more, the merrier.
The growing popularity of social media is making the online world more like the offline world. It’s like high school all over again. The popular kids get noticed.
But there’s good news. You don’t have to be good looking to be popular online. You don’t have to be good at sports or be a cheerleader. You don’t even have to produce great content. Good is enough. You just have to work hard by participating with social media users. It’s these users that cause good content to have more traffic than non-marketed great content.
So, if you don’t want to lose to lower quality content, you need to add social media to your marketing arsenal. You need to start building friendships with social media users.
Will this add a time consuming task to your online business? Definitely. Just another reason to focus on fewer sites.
Your thoughts?
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You’re better off focusing on one or two social media sites also, unless you use one of those “submit to all social media” things and can submit some breaking story to 10 different ones in a matter of seconds.
Good point. I’ve been talking about focusing on fewer sites and the same applies to social media sites.
where would you start?
I would start with StumbleUpon, because they send traffic pretty quickly as long as you have a couple of votes.
Netscape is also a good one, because the community there is pretty friendly. It’s not too hard to get votes from Netscape users. Also, Netscape works for many different niches whereas Digg and Reddit have less topics.
How to hit the front page of Digg? It’s simple, it’s enough to write/copy cool content and ask 50 friends for a digg on IM. Reddit? It’s enough to write/copy great content and ask 30 friends. Stumble, it enough to write/copy and ask friends. Netscape, any other social bookmarking service - you do it the same way. What’s about the price, the price is the fact that the crowd builds social business, and the second one - someday all these social traffic hunters might wake up with a community of 30-seconds-visitors that don’t click. How many RSS feeds will you subscribe if all worth content is listed in your favorite web 2.0 service? For e.g. take a look at the comments discussions, where all these incoming traffic add comments, on a blog that has been dugg, or directly on a page of submitted article on Digg/Reddit/Stumble/whatever? Do I overact? ]:->
The tricky part is finding a bunch of friends and then getting them all to vote in the same 24 hour period.
Sounds like a case of its not what you know its who you know :) I would say on the article which I promoted to friends to digg the traffic brought in has been much higher than other articles.
Great point.
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I find your post somewhat confusing.
IMHO, social media sites are an alternative method of searching for relevant content - relevance being determined democratically. So, there is no way these sites can displace content. Content is still king!
However, I believe social media sites do have the intrinsic potential to dethrone vanilla search engines. Whether that actually will happen only time can tell.
My point was that having friends in social media seems more important than having great content. Content is still necessary and important. However, good content coupled with the power of social media will get more traffic and links than great content that’s not marketed effectively through social media.
I was comparing the importance between content and social media. They’re both important. I was just answering the question of which one was more important.
Let me add this. You need at least good content. You can have a bunch of friends vote for your mediocre content, but everyone else will vote it down.
Amen!
I think the first time you do these, it gets kinda hard, but after that it is a lot easier. It also takes up a LOT of time to do these networking sites.
Yes, it does take a lot of time. It’s just like the offline world. It takes time to build and maintain real-life and online friendships.
[...] the last two days, I’ve talked about social media. The first post was about how social media is trumping content. The second post was about the power of social media. Social media friendships are the key to [...]