I am a big IMEEM fan and I know there are tons of different music social networks out there that can be used, but I just like the way that IMEEM is. I was doing some searching through IMEEM for a good playlist and the first one I ran into was one put together by a user by the name of kiasoul. I went to the playlist and as you would expect, it was a playlist put together by Kia promoting their new Kia Soul vehicle. Genius I thought. I know I may be a little slow because everyone else probably already thought to do this, but I thought I would jump on the same band wagon and let people that hadn’t thought to do it see how I did it.

I am in charge of the organic and social media here at PMA Media Group and one of our big assets we’re trying to promote is My Colleges and Careers which focuses on online education and non-traditional continuing education. Well the demographics don’t get anymore perfect than IMEEM. So I thought I would write an article about what I did.

Marketing With IMEEM Process

1. Create Profile

https://www.imeem.com/signup/
Create an account and fill out all the necessary information. I tried to keep it as close to the company name or website as possible since I’ll be promoting the company and/or website through the account.

2. Modify Profile Theme

http://www.imeem.com/profilecolors/
Next I started modifying the theme to work for what I was doing. I actually had a color palette I was working with so it made this quick and easy. There are quite a few free ones that you may want to just modify. I took the default one. Just edit the current theme and modify it how you would like it to look.

3. Add Banner Image

Next add background images and a banner image with your web address and any company branding that can help people start to recognize you. My banner image was 900 pixels wide and around 150 pixels tall.

4. Modify Profile Layout

http://www.imeem.com/customizeprofile/
Then I went in and made sure all of my layout elements were the way that I wanted them. IMEEM has a blog within it so I wanted to make sure that I had my blog posts listed there. There’s also a blogroll within the IMEEM blog where you can link out to other sites.

5. Create Playlists

http://www.imeem.com/mycollegesandcareers/playlists/
Now it’s time to name some playlists. I tried to create some targeted playlists for specific activities that relate to college life and school in general. You just want to try and personalize these playlists to your market.

6. Search for Related Songs and Add to Playlists

http://www.imeem.com/tag/college/music/
Next comes the songs. I decided to first search for songs. Use the search box up top on IMEEM and choose from the dropdown, “music”. You can also search by other options but I was more interested in specific topics. Then when the results come up, click on the title of the song you would like to listen to. When the song comes up there will be a link below the player that says “Playlist”. Click on that then there will be a dropdown to select which playlist to add the song to. “Repeat and rinse” until you are satisfied with your playlists.

7. Make Comments

At the bottom of all the songs or whatever songs you prefer, leave a comment about the song. You should also rate each song to help the songs get popularity and recommend them. As people see your comments, there will be a link back to your profile.

8. Make Friends

Make friends with other IMEEM users. As you update Playlists, create blog post, and through various other IMEEM community activities, your friends will get notified. Friends will tell their friends, and like other social networking strategies, if you have more friends you will have a higher chance of getting traffic coming to your site and you will also have friendships to leverage in the future as you need to.

9. Place Badge Link on Site

The last thing that I recommend you do, is to create an IMEEM badge that you can place on your site(s) that will link directly to your profile. This will potentially get Google and other search engines crawling your IMEEM profile, but also potentially it will help keep your visitors to your site close to you. Badges are an ideal way to let people know what networks you are involved in and to build a relationship with you in a different way. To see a live example of the badge we create go and visit the My Colleges and Careers Blog.

Conclusion

I hope a few of you have benefited from this article. Please let me know how things work out for you. Please leave any feedback you have or even suggestions that could help readers in the comments area of this blog post.

Facebook is amazing on the chart.  Look at it’s growth in the last 6 months even.  It easily overcame MySpace and recently overcame YouTube.  These statistics I’m assuming don’t track all the API hook ins for different Apps that have been built by you could only imagine all the traffic Facebook might see from that.  Another employee and I were just talking about all the older people that are starting to get on Facebook.  It’s amazing who’s starting to use it.  It definitely has more of an appeal than MySpace.

The top 5 Social Networks by Traffic in order are:

1. Facebook
2. YouTube
3. MySpace
4. Digg
5. Photobucket

I just thought I’d graph my honorable mention networks too taking out the big three, Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace.

Honorable Mention and Up Coming:

1. Flickr
2. Yelp
3. Twitter

Twitter I think is probably one of the hardest to track.  It probably has more stuff hooked into it’s API externally.  I’m sure if we were able to track all the posts and things going on it would probably be number one on the list.  Even looking at the curve that is being tracked it looks like it’s going to look very similar to Facebook.

Flickr is barely less than Photobucket.  Not much to say other than that about Flickr.

I would keep your eye on Yelp.  I predict it to continue to grow fairly rapidly.  Especially as it’s consumed via mobile devices.  I think people will discover it more with the mobile apps then go home and write their reviews on their desktops.  Yelp is an awesome network allowing you to find and review local restaurants and businesses.  The curve of Yelp appears to be a gradual climb but I predict it starts to quickly head north.  If you haven’t started using Yelp yet, I recommend you do.  The more data it can collect the better the information it will provide.

What are your predictions?  What do you have to say about these graphs?

For example, I use Twitter and am connected pretty much all day to Twitter whether it’s on my phone or at my desk.  When someone Twitters a website, my tendency is to ignore that link.  I have found that if I go and read the article and I’m able to leave comments on that post, there are quite a few other people that are reading that post from Twitter and other social networks that have picked that article up. Next thing I know I’m getting traffic from all of the social traffic that the blog post has been receiving.

So not only do I gain traffic from Twitter itself, I’m able to leverage the followers that Tweet has, but I’m also able to push it on to Digg and/or Reddit and/or other networks and create more traffic for that post. It’s amazing how much traffic you can generate if you follow good quality commenting rules and promote articles that you have commented on.  I read two really good articles about quality commenting.

The first article was  4 Effective Ways to Comment on Different Blogs and the second one Formula for Effective Commenting state a lot of great tips. This is the condensed list of what I gathered from them both:

1. Find similar blogs so you can create relevant links and/or relevant traffic.
2. Add to the conversation, don’t just say “Nice Post”.
3. Only link to your blog or site when it makes sense.
4. Be different or intelligent when you comment.
5. Ask questions when commenting.  .
6. Answer questions that are asked.
7. Object appropriately, remember comments are moderated.
8. Join the conversation.
9. Keep comments short.
10. Be early in the comments.
11. Respond to comments about your comments.
12. Be funny.
13. Be real and genuine when commenting.
14. Keep commenting.
15. Keep a consistent identity so that you can build a reputation and people will recognize and trust your comments.

So the key to effective commenting is to comment in conjunction with social networking.

If you leverage other peoples friends and users by commenting on the things that they share, you can also gain a tremendous amount of traffic and potentially a larger following.

Fishing

1. Determine where you’re going to fish.
2. Determine what type of fish you are trying to catch.
3. Determine what type of bait you need to use to catch the right fish.
4. What type of hook are you going to use?
   1. Spinner
   2. Fly
   3. Bait Hook
   4. Jig
   5. Treble Hook

Link Baiting

1. Determine what networks you’re going to try and get traffic from.
2. Determine who your audience is.
3. Determine what topics your audience would be interested in.
4. What type of a link baiting hook are you going to use?
   1. Resource Hook
   2. News Hook
   3. Contrary Hook
   4. Attack Hook
   5. Humor Hook

Clarity?

Does that help illustrate Link Baiting? Every social network and website can be different just like every fishing hole and pond. There is no right way to do it, depending on the season and a lot of different circumstances beyond our control, the fish bite at different times and in different places.  The best thing is to be the first one to the fishing hole and to have something shiny and new that will attract them.  There are plenty of other articles out there that go into the details behind using the different “Link Baiting Hooks“.

Leave your comments and let us know what you think or if there’s a better way of illustrating this.

When beginning any type of online marketing campaign with any type of social media optimization involved you want to join the most effective social networks that you can find. So I decided to take a list that Traffikd had put together with a big list of social networks and see what type of traffic Compete estimated the sites had along with Google’s Page Rank.

Here are the results:

Top Ten Social Networks by PageRank

*Ranked first by Page Rank then by Compete.com to determine tie breakers. Full list of all 360+ can be found at Google Docs here and downloaded under File->Export.

Top Ten Social Networks by Compete.com Visitor Stats

*Ranked first by Compete.com and used Page Rank to determine tie breakers. Full list of all 360+ can be found at Google Docs here and downloaded under File->Export.

Get the spreadsheet of all 360+ Social Networks from Google Docs.

View Spreadsheet Now (last updated 3/25/2009)

Be sure to check all the sheets at the bottom of the document for the different sorted views. (All Data, Alphabetical, Compete (visitors), and PR)

We put our research online and available for the full report of rankings. There are over 360 social networks on the list. You can download it locally and use it as a checklist or however you’d like to consume the data. If you found this article useful share it with your friends, tweet it, digg it, or do whatever you can to spread this resource.

Some social networks didn’t make our list because they had so little data that Compete didn’t pick them up as having enough data. If you have suggestions for other social networks to add to the list let us know.

Please leave us some comments.