The super key to unlocking the vast potential and viral nature of social media is understanding what it is…a value exchange.

You’re here reading this because you either like social media or understand the power it’s going to have for your business and want to capture as much market share as you can early on.

And this is going to be a big key because if you can get there before your competitors, capture the attention of your marketplace and hold that attention by giving them good value they won’t ever leave you for your competitors.

Or at least if your competitors catch their attention they’ll still come back and listen to the the authority you’ve developed with them.

Social media in all its forms is already mainstream and continues to have explosive growth with both the number of users and the amount of time they spend using the services going through the roof.

The amount of social traffic is phenomenal.

The growth rates of these various sites have been staggering with Facebook said to be growing at over 100,000 new accounts per day and I just saw a story about Skype where they were growing at over 300,000 users per day.

Clearly with these kind of numbers you need to be ahead of the pack with the most cutting edge tactics so that your brand and your business have all the visibility you can handle.

Because if you don’t get their you can be guaranteed your competitors will and probably already are.

There is a certain etiquette and social code which you must follow to maintain the quality of your brand and avoid getting cut down and ostracized.

The viral nature of the word-of-mouth on social media moves at incredible speed so if you do something bad you know the people who saw you do it are going to tell eight or 10 of their friends and those people probably tell five or six and those people three or four on down the line.

You’ve probably heard the horror stories of big companies getting this wrong with Dell having a huge blow up about their customer service which lit up the blogosphere with tons of negative buzz.

And also something that really pissed off a lot of moms in the twitter moms group was when Motrin did that ad a while back which got a lot of twitter play.  And it was almost exclusively negative twitter buzz.

As a side note Twitter is a great tool for real-time market research.

One of the biggest things you want to do in this value exchange is to monitor what people are saying about you.  You can set these things up in twitter to search for whatever keyword your company is and get a pulse on what people are saying right now.

You can also search for groups on Facebook and MySpace about your company or brand.

By knowing what people are saying about you, you can answer those questions and get out ahead of any negative buzz tidal wave and stop it in its tracks before too much damage is done.

If you’re just starting out with a website domain name which you bought two days ago you can also build a lot of brand recognition and viral buzz very quickly for free when you know how to do it and you do it right.

The biggest thing to know is what is the main thing your market wants, the main result they’re looking to achieve and also two to three secondary results they want in their lives.

Then you post out and promote to the various social networks good quality content which addresses these issues and puts them on the path to getting those results.  This will build your authority in their minds and allow you to capture and hold their attention.

This way they’ll view you as an authority and keep reading your stuff coming back for more and more.  Once you have this hallowed place in their minds they will give you great trust and credibility and a high percentage will do what you say.

This is when you can give them a nudge and say “hey in this blog post I talk about getting better results and at the end is a time-saving service for a very affordable price you can get”.

You don’t want to do blatant overt selling but this kind of side door selling is very effective because your social media friends don’t feel like just a number to you and they can make their own decision after reading it whether they want to buy the service or not.  If they perceive it has value to them a lot of them will buy.

Basically by linking to blog posts and other quality stories you find which would be of interest to your market and your friends and then intermingle with that some of your own stories and comments you’ll get a lot of mileage, build brand recognition, and ultimately be a valued friend.

This will give you the best you chance for success once you reach this status as that trusted valued friend.  Because ask yourself “whose recommendations to go to a movie or buy something do I take most seriously and act upon?”

Leave me your comments below. Follow Alexander on Twitter

Originally posted 2009-02-24 09:13:23. Republished by Old Post Promoter

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