The following is a guest post by Tibi Puiu, a professional blogger and social media consultant, who can be found writing down at Lost Art of Blogging.
As marketers and bloggers, we should all be very opened minded and inclined to new things. Exploration is the keyword here. If you want to be successful, in any activity you might want to follow, it’s very very important you always look around you, analyze and experiment with your work and surroundings.
In the past the easiest way to get in contact with the latest trends and so on, was to follow as many conventional media institutions as possible, from newspapers, to radio, to TV; but now with the development of the internet the world has become a smaller place and by far the easiest way to stay at top of the game with the latest, in any field, is to be active in social media.
Social media has been around for a long time now, bridging the gab between consumers and establishments (websites), but it’s only been recently that it managed to explode on the mainstream. If you’re a bit unfamiliarized with social media and all it represents, I’d recommend you first start reading my introduction to social media. If you need a few reasons why you should start extensively using social media, then I’ll just lay them down for you bellow. You’ll get converted in no time.
1. Traffic. This is probably the main reason why you should start using social media. It’s widely known that social media has the power to bring obscene amounts of traffic to your blog or website, infinitely easier then waiting years to establish your website and spending thousands on SEO services. A first hand example is the notorious digg effect, which describes the period of time in which an article from a blog or website gets popular on digg. The traffic that digg can send is tremendous, powerful enough to shatter most servers (around 100k uniques). Try building this kind of traffic the old fashion way.