I learned how to drive 36 million pageviews to web properties through social media platforms by employing three levels of adoption. The Social Trinity is the foundation of a social media policy that allows you to use communication tools on digital networks for the purpose of building your own community. Once you gain an understanding of the true value of each contact feature on a digital network, you can adapt the use of social platforms, formulate your social media strategy, and communicate with your target communities and to make them part of your own community.

The Social Trinity

1. Identify all points of exposure for your digital assets.
2. Identify all points of private contact.
3. Study popular sections and past successful campaigns launched on the digital network.

For instance on Twitter, a point of exposure can be an @reply, hashtag, comment on a wall, link to external website over which you have control. Points have exposure leave your footprint on an action performed on a social network. When you @reply a person your conversation exchange is viewed by everybody who follows you and that person and people who find your conversation through a search engine query. Naturally, the more you @reply people the more you are exposed to their followings. Similarly, on Digg when you vote for content, you leave a link pointing back to your profile; thus the the more you Digg the more exposure you receive to your digital asset on Digg – your profile.

Points of private contact will allow you to work out collaborative arrangements with other users of the platform. Peripherally, you should also learn how the culture on the digital network shapes the way private means of contact are used. I know of many people with large followings that typically ignore direct messages; an alternative way of contact would be to follow the link in a Twitter user’s profile to load up a person’s blog or other website that may have an email or other point of contact to which a person may pay more attention. Some people more frequently use the Facebook private messaging system.

Some platforms have popular sections such as the Digg front page and Twitter trending topics. You could study these popular submissions and adapt your submissions to cater to the community members’ interests. When popular entries are hard to find, google terms such as ‘twitter case study’ or ‘[social network]‘ + ‘case study’ or ‘[popular tactic]‘ like ‘contests, sweepstakes, viral campaigns.’ Once you learn of popular and successful campaigns you can try a similar campaign adapted to cater to your target community; you use your points of exposure and points of private contact to communicate with other people on the platform required to execute your campaign.

Neal Rodriguez discusses social media marketing tactics he has executed to meet his and his clients’ business objectives on nealrodriguez.com. Subscribe to Neal’s feed to stay abreast of his updates.