By the Social Media Dynamics Team
What Flickr, Digg and Delicious can do for your business
After you’ve developed your routine on the Big 4 social media programs of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs, moving beyond to Flickr, Digg and Delicious offers important benefits:
- Increased web presence
- Increased search engine optimization, backlinks, Google “juice”
- Increased community, relationships, new audiences
- Sources of creative ideas
Flickr, Digg and Delicious each offer all of these benefits. In general, every link to your site and every additional web presence you create increases the opportunity for greater returns in new audience and higher site rankings.
Each offers you a Profile section to share information publicly about your business, website, events, charities, teams and locations.
Each offers community and group participation to develop and engage in relationships with members. Be sure to “lurk” in all sites to get comfortable with what is said. Monitor conversations. Then join in and leave comments, being sure to leave your contact information in the signature you leave on your post. Let the listening you do suggest new ideas for what more you can provide your audience in terms of education, reputation management, information and entertainment.
- Flickr is image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community owned by Yahoo! Popular as a website for users to share personal photographs, Flickr is widely used by bloggers to host images used in blogs and social media. As of October 2009, it claims to host more than 4 billion images.[1]
Posting images of new products, locations, community activities, and industry events helps a business get better ranking due to Google’s affinity for indexing images and video. Join Flickr groups to engage like-minded visitors and share images. All images help: logos, photos, headshots, product and store shots, portfolio graphics and stills and video from events. The benefits can include the viral nature of your new audience sharing your images with others, increasing your prospects and community.
Look for images that you might like to get permission to use in your blog posts and the like. Note copyrights and give attribution where required. Make sure to “tag” images with great keywords and captions to make them easy to be found with search terms.
- Digg is a social news website, letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. The website traffic ranked 100th by Alexa.com as of April 2, 2010.
Digg likes postings of recent news including articles, fresh news events and new products and services, helping to gain short-term traffic surges while stories are current. Again the viral nature of sharing comes into play in terms of getting in front of more and more new audience members. You begin to see the value and importance of strong content and creative that’s interesting and compelling enough to share.
- Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks that is owned by Yahoo. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique URLs bookmarked URLs.
I’ve seen suggestions to submit every page of your site to Delicious. Certainly submit articles, site sections, and blog posts that you think offer great content value. Take advantage to develop your Profile, add photos and even a blog if you like. Explore the applications available to see what might be helpful.
Yahoo’s ownership of both Flickr and Delicious certainly helps get pages indexed faster. The intertwining of these services with your Yahoo and My Yahoo account increases the exposure of graphics, profile and contacts.
Many of these services let you tie back to your Twitter, Facebook, blog and other social media activities to share in their venues. So share away, develop new audiences, explore and benefit from your expanding social media universe.
[1] Source for all definitions: Wikipedia
See also: Beyond the Big 4
@social_dynamics
Tags: Delicious, Digg, Flickr, social bookmarking, social media for business
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