Strategy Training Exercise
As a training example of how a busy social networking site can help you understand social networks and marketing on them, here’s the skinny I taught about 43things.com, back in April 2007.
Although this training is a little old, the concepts and investigative research skills learned are just as valuable.
First of all you must be really careful about how you approach 43things. (In fact, I would completely stay away from that site for marketing purposes or risk wasting hours of your time. However, you can practice your skills there and even do a little research on your niche topics as you peek into the minds of your potential customers.)
Appear to be completely natural in joining and contributing to this community. Don’t stuff keywords into your username or upload photos of your product as your profile picture.
Simply join, make a few posts over the next week, make a post with a link around day 6 or 7 and never have 2 posts with outgoing links per day or per page (topic/goal) and you should be fine.
During the initial strategy phase you’ll want to poke around the site to find the best keywords and tags to use, as well as the urls to add your content to.
For instance look at the results and factors I discovered while searching for acne topics to post on. (Running a search on the site with the simplest of keywords from the front page will ensure you find all topic pages related to your primary keyword).
| 43things page titled: | URL | # of People Linking | Google PR | Updated |
| “acne” | http://www.43things.com/things/view/86215 | 19 | PR2 | 3 months ago |
| “clear up my acne” | http://www.43things.com/things/view/116677 | 61 | PR3 | 6 weeks ago |
| “get rid of my acne” | http://www.43things.com/things/view/57991 | 396 | PR4 | 3 days ago |
| “get rid of acne” | http://www.43things.com/things/view/81752 | 55 | PR3 | 6 days ago |
Here’s What You Want to Observe and Consider
A higher number of people with the same goal means more traffic to that page (whether a user has that goal or not).
PR is not one of the largest factors to consider but factor it in anyway – an outgoing link from a PR4 page is always better than a PR1, after all. At the time of writing 43things does not employ the nofollow tag.
Last Updated – the longer it’s been since a post has been made, the better! You could take over the page with your posts quite naturally within a week (3-4 posts per page) or at least keep a top spot longer. There are no guarantees of course. Just because a page hasn’t been updated for 3 months doesn’t mean some other savvy marketer isn’t going to jump in on your action.
Give the above (member only content) conditions, your social marketing strategy would be to choose and write down those tag(s) and your approximate posting schedule – then implement it!
