Determining Where You Need to Participate

Communication is such an important part of social media, and communication is a two-way street. In social media, communication isn't a bullhorn; you need to interact with people. If you want the rewards of participation, you need to listen, as well as talk. This idea often gets lost when people start using social media to promote their content.

Determining who you want to interact with and where to interact with them is a large part of using social media in your marketing strategy. Finding the best communities in which you can participate and actively engage in conversations is the quickest way to build a loyal audience.

As a blogger, you often work as the marketing person for your own blog. In order to gain readership, you need to participate with your potential audience in communities where they are already participating. Additionally, you can really leverage participating in these communities if you understand the bloggers in your niche, work with them to possibly get a guest-blogging slot, or even get links from them in their blogrolls.

Taking the time to create a list of potential audiences goes a long way toward creating your own blog-marketing strategy. Your list should include social networks and message boards where you think that your content will be greeted with open arms, bloggers who work in the niche you participate in that you want to monitor, and users who have influence on other social networks (such as someone who has a large Twitter following in your niche, or your particular area of interest/expertise).

Some bloggers have actually purchased lists of other bloggers in their niche from marketing firms. Personally, I don't like to buy established lists or rely solely on a monitoring service. (We talk about social-media monitoring more in Chapter 5 of this minibook.) Although purchased lists might make for a good jumping-off point, a lot of lists are outdated or ignore important markets (such as large social networking, Twitter, or YouTube friends/followers).

The most important piece of research a person can do while constructing a list is to understand the niche to which they're building a readership in. Here are some items of interest that I look for when finding out about a niche:

• Who's in the niche? When I put together a list of bloggers to target, I feel like a detective. Each link on a blogroll or in a post seems like a clue. Start with a major blog in your niche and see where the blogroll leads, the links to commenters' blogs, and blogs that they mention in their content to get a wide view of the niche. Knowing who associates with whom and what circles people run in can help you discover a lot about a niche. You can determine who the power players are, as well as whether the niche is competitive about news or has a collegial atmosphere. This information helps you determine how you want to approach your outreach.
• Is there a niche social-media site or group that acts as a connecting point for the community? Often, in various groups, you can find one or more niche social-media sites that connect blogs together. These sites can provide you with a great resource for discovering some of the top blogs, and they may help you flesh out your list of bloggers quickly. Additionally, see whether you can get your blog listed on these types of sites. Most of these kinds of sites allow free submittals, and you can find forms to fill out or an e-mail address to which you can submit your content.

  The site Milblogging.com is great example of a small niche community designed around a topic; in this case, a community of members of the military. This kind of online community might be a directory with social features, a Ning community, or a group on a large social network; whatever the case may be, you can often find large groups that have discussions within a niche. These niche sites can tell you what people in the niche you are targeting find important, what the hot topics are, and information about what other people are doing in this niche, such as pitches people have made to other bloggers.

  Additionally, these sites feature the type of content that people in your niche may find interesting. I usually keep a Word document open or use Evernote to write down blogging ideas based on the conversations on these sites.

• Are common discussions occurring throughout the community? You can often discover opportunities to get your blog in front of new people or for topics to cover by looking for common threads within a niche. Maybe the bloggers are talking about how PR people are pitching them, a charity cause that they all support, or an event that they regard as important. A common theme may give you information, opportunity, or direction on how you should approach this niche.
• Do they use other media to have discussions? Find out what other social-media sites people in this niche use. Maybe they use Twitter a lot, or maybe you see a high use of Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, FriendFeed, or YouTube. You may find secondary ways to reach this niche where you can build a following for your blog.

  It pays to determine the social-media sites your niche prefers. Certain niches (such as wine bloggers) have taken to Twitter, but others have strong ties to Facebook or other social-networking sites. Leverage these sites when you pitch your blog to customers. They may prefer that method of connection.

In the end, you might think you can simply buy a list, slam together a bunch of search results into a spreadsheet, and then mass–e-mail everyone whom you want to contact. However, without studying how your niche operates, you can't create mutually beneficial relationships, you can't become a voice in the community, and you probably can't see a lot of success. Instead, you come off as an outsider just trying to push your message down the throats of these bloggers, and your campaign will have very poor results.