Mediaboss Marketing

Content marketing and social network marketing are not the same thing. Content marketing is creating solid, high-integrity content that attracts prospective business opportunities. Social network marketing is pushing around your friends, family, and the hundreds of other people you do NOT know, but have befriended so it looks like you know a lot of people.

I hear the two terms, Social Media and Social Networks, used interchangeably. But that does NOT make them the same. Nor should they be thought of as the same animal.

Blogging Like a Mad Dog

Social Mediais creating solid content that people love to read and pass around. Theres a best choice medium to do this the owners home site via their CMS. I recommend WordPress. People find that home site, leave comments (its social!) and the owner responds creating a dialog (its social!) and sometimes commenters talk among themselves on the content owners site (its social!). And when the content is really, really good, the content gets passed around to the social networks. (Right again. Its social!).

Social Networkingis a tiny form of social media. It might be more accurately calledSocial Network Marketing.There is a medium for publishing content somebody elses site. And the content does not belong to the owner (it kind of does). But for those who are very active on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn, after you have created something really cool, wait a week (sometimes a couple of days, and sometimes even a couple of hours), then go back and try to find it. Let me know how that works for you. The average length of time for an update on social media is 3 hours! (Check outfact number 7 from a recent SEJ post!) Social networking is hanging out with friends and family. And the last time I checked you dont do business with friends and family.

Anyone doing marketing on the social networks has one aim to push people to their website. It doesnt work. Its no good. Dont waste your time. The numbers add up pretty fast and they are fun to watchbut those numbers dont equate to more business.

I learned the lesson that social network marketing is a waste of time more than 8 years ago.

Heres how I know.

In March of 06 my first website in theBillBelew.comnetwork of sites was born. After a couple of months of writing like a mad dog I got up to about 2,000 page views in a month. The network I belonged to was using display ads = page views, which is what we were after. And, of course, we wanted clicks so we could get a higher ecpm for our ads.

Two months after my site was born I discovered there were social networking sites where I could promote my workmore or less. I think Facebook still had The in its name. In fact Facebook and LinkedIn EACH still had about 5,000,000 members. Twitter what? G+ what?

Read the original here:
Social Media Versus Social Networking as a Content Marketing Strategy by @billbelew_com