Ah yes, social media. I’ve run everything from viral Twitter campaigns to Facebook contests designed to rapidly grow fan counts. The most success I have seen comes when the fan, follower, or tweep is given the chance to be heard and not just advertised to.

Blogging
Blogging has been somewhat forgotten, but, when combined with social media and SEO principles can be a powerful marketing tool for any business. I’ve spent quite a few years in the blogosphere, starting with a blog/podcast that helped students start and run successful small businesses. After a year of mistakes and learning from them, this podcast spent two years as a top ranked resource for student entrepreneurs. In Summer of 2010 I started SlopeFillers which is now read by nearly a thousand people a week including resort marketers from all over North America and Europe.

Twitter
I started using Twitter as a marketing tool toward the end of 2008. Since then I have managed more than a dozen accounts totaling nearly 100,000 followers, including:

• @timeclick
• @greggblanchard
• @spamfreeseal
• @snsnowmaking
• @slopefillers

With Twitter I’ve gone through stages of focusing solely on traffic as well as exclusively building relationships and believe that the most effective Twitter campaigns are an intelligent combination of the two.

Facebook
With many different types of media that can be shared, Facebook is an amazing marketing tool that allows a business to connect with their market at a very personal level. Some of my recent Facebook shenanigans include:

• Increasing a page’s fan count by 25% in less than 4 days.
• Creating custom tabs that drive users to click the “like” button
• Optimizing the posted content to frequently show up in fans’ news feeds
• Testing various sizes and types of profile images for efficacy
• Combining events, “suggest to friends”, messaging, etc. to build viral contests

In the end, Facebook is a powerful, but ever-changing tool. New policies, notification defaults, and algorithms make it an fun, but evolving resource.

YouTube / etc.
One often overlooked area of “optimization” is YouTube optimization. I take regular time to analyze where my videos are ranking, adjust factors as necessary, and measure the results to get my videos to show up as frequently as possible. As a result, my videos have more than 100,000 combined views despite being focused on narrow niches.

The social media world evolves and changes extremely quickly.  New technologies, complementary tools, are always creating new ways to connect with, and market to an audience.