FF -- Where's the money in social media? - Mark
Vanessa Fox, Ignition Partners
- Make it easy for people to see what your site as to offer.
- Bear in mind that social media visitors don't convert as well as search visitors.
Michael Gray, Wolf-Howl Blog
- Sales should not be your big focus with social traffic.
- Products generally do better than services. Consumer goods do better than B2B products.
- Impulse purchases do better.
- Low or door buster prices do better, especially on tech items.
- Monitor what people are saying about you and don't ignore it. Do some damage control.
- Let customers choose mode of delivery of info, email, RSS, web.
- See Diet.com's videos, biggest losers.
- See StyleDash as example social site. List clothes seen in the media at the lowest costs.
- Use Twitter: see Carnival Cruise and Southwest Air and Jet Blue channels for examples.
Alexander Barbara, ReidBrown - Monetizing Digg Traffic
- The longer an item has been live, the more Diggs it needs to make it onto Digg. 30-40 votes to get a post up in the first couple of hours.
- Be ready to handle the traffic. Redirect traffic to a Coral cache, or the Google cache. If you want to use Google cache, post it a week ahead so it can be cached properly. Make sure to redirect before you get the traffic spike. If your site goes down, Digg will pull your entry. With Coral cache, make sure to forward before your server crashes, otherwise Coral will show the crash page.
- Digg users don't click on ads. They have extreme ad blindness. Alex suggests pulling ads, then putting them up after day 3. - Click throughs work well for the referral traffic. Wait for the Diggers to come and go, then put the ads up.
- Use the Digg traffic to boost your RSS subscribers and incoming links, rather than trying to push ads to the Diggers. There's also huge branding value which will effect long term earnings.
- Understand your audience. Offer plenty of deep links based on what your audience is looking for.
Laura Fitton, Pistachio Consulting - Building Last Value Through Social Media
- Ads are out. In the future you will be able to make money helping people buy.
- Find communities that are a fit for what you are an expert on.
