The changing face of social media marketing

Keeping your finger on the pulse is very important in internet marketing and reacting to changes is key to maximising the effectiveness of your campaign.

A couple of years ago, everybody was starting to hear about something magical called linkbait where marketers created amazing content which gained lots of links.

Soon enough thousands of webmasters joined in and links flowed freely.

Fast forward 12 months and linkbait has started to change. Today the backlash has started and most people can't bait links for love nor money.

The problem is that most link-baiters are using tried and tested techniques that might have worked once but the industry has grown tired of them.

For example, a year ago a list of the "Top 10 Ways to Market Your Website" might have done very well but now people won't link to it because it's linkbait.

The mere existence of a number in the title stops people linking to the post.

Bloggers around the world are tired of linkbait and prefer to link to pillar articles with thousands of words of content about a subject. Anything but a linkbait post.

Savvy marketers are way ahead of the curve here and still get thousands of links a week while people trying to linkbait are being left behind.

The key issue is that linkbait needs a hook, a reason for somebody to link to you. Writing a Top 10 list is NOT a hook.

If you want traffic from Digg then MAYBE you can write a Top 10 list and get on the homepage but do this for mindshare, not links.

Next time you write a Top 10 list try to leave the number out of the title and see how many more links it gets.

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