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).

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!

Today it is one of my least favorite social networks mainly because the moderators of the busiest ‘things’ (categories) are humans with zero experience, and at the time it seemed zero rules as to which accounts they nuke.

Having provided (back then in their early days, approximately 30,000 words of content and sending hundreds of new users, when I decided to post a link to my site (and I do promise I did it with grace and dignity) a former-fatty, jealous moderator jumped on and deleted my entire account, all my content that I had spent months creating, and my uploaded photos. My profile had a PR5 then, which really hurt.

Is 43things.com any different today? I can’t say I care much which is why the ‘give away’ video as a sample to SocialMarketingStrategy.com’s membership is the walk-through and ideas on social networking and marketing on 43things.com.

Go at your own risk. Promote your content and interact with others knowing that at any moment it could be swiped away, no matter how informative and helpful your posts are to their users…

Here’s the video.