ptg16476052Promoting Your Web Pages 64123
Many people talk about “viral” marketing. The concept is simple: Instead of purchasing
an advertisement that may be displayed for hundreds or thousands of people, you tell
just a few interested people about your site (or essay, or product, or movie, or whatever
it is that you’ve created), and then they in turn share it with people they think will be
interested, and so on, until it has reached a large audience. The advantage, assuming that
it works, is that it’s inexpensive, and your message has been delivered by people who
the audience is actually willing to listen to—people they already know. The difficulty is
in creating something that is interesting to large audiences in the first place and in tell-
ing the right people about it so that they are interested in sharing in what you’ve created.
Taking advantage of social media is one way to accomplish the second part of the task.
Regardless of the outlet, the two steps are to establish a presence and to be interesting.
Twitter (https://twitter.com) is one of the most popular social media sites these days.
After you’ve signed up for an account, you can follow other people on Twitter, and
people who find you interesting will follow you. A lot of people on the Web give advice
on how to attract large numbers of followers, and a lot of people on Twitter follow thou-
sands of people in hopes that people will follow them in return.
Focusing on follower counts is the wrong approach. Remember, the goal with social
media is to establish an audience of people who actually care about what you’re doing.
Let’s say you’ve created a new website for knitting enthusiasts, and in hopes of promot-
ing the site, you’ve created a Twitter account to go along with it.
Creating a Twitter account is easy and free. To create a Twitter
account, you need only supply an account name, a full name, an
email address, and a password of your choosing. The account
name and full name can be anything you like. After you’ve fol-
lowed those steps, you’re all set.NOTEFor starters, you should create posts on Twitter with links back to your site whenever you
publish something new. You should also follow people who say interesting things, pref-
erably on the subject of knitting. If they say something you find particularly interesting,
you should retweet it; this means you repeat it, mentioning their Twitter handle, to your
followers. You should respond to people when you have something interesting to say,
too. If you do so, eventually they may follow you in return. If things go well, eventually
you’ll have a great outlet for promoting your site, and even if they go poorly, you’ll be
participating in a community of people who like to talk about the subject of your site—
knitting. That’s social media in a nutshell.