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While browsing my Twitter feed recently I came upon a link by an author known as much for her expertise in online marketing than for her actual books. The article in question discussed social media as a tool for book marketing, and whether or not employing social media fads (Twitter, in particular) works in the long run when you’re trying to sell books. The point brought up concerned the limited audience of a Twitter user: why expend so much energy in this one place where you may have less than a hundred followers, when there are other ways to market and reach a potentially larger audience?

There is validity to that question, of course. Speaking as a writer and editor, I use all sorts of social devices to promote work. There are the profiles on MySpace and Facebook, the lens on Squidoo, the accounts at del.icio.us and Digg and…you get the idea. With the time spent pushing works on these sites, one might think I could write another book free and clear. Marketing is time-consuming, yet beneficial, and of course if sales are going to come from these efforts it is important to make sure you market wisely. To put so much energy into a campaign few will see may not yield the results you want, and you can’t get that time back.

These ideas are easily applicable to promoting websites. Is it wise to spend the entire day on Twitter talking about how people should visit your site, when in truth you may have only fifty followers on your profile, and few if any are “re-tweeting” your posts to their accounts so more eyeballs can see them? Who will see your efforts, and how can your business grow if you limit yourself this way, is the argument.

Does this mean sites like Twitter and Digg are useless in promotion? Not necessarily. Due to the growth of Twitter, for example, it now boasts its own search engine which allows anybody to find relevant topics among the thousands of Twitter users. The one advantage to social bookmarking sites and micro-blogging sites is that new information comes as quickly as it is posted on the wires. Somebody may not need to follow a thousand Twitter users for breaking news, when he can search for it. Whether you are selling goods or promoting services, if you use the right combination of keywords the likelihood somebody will find you via Twitter will increase.

Take, for example, a recent event on the Twitter site that captured the attention of bloggers in the publishing industry. A literary agent established a topic called #queryfail which covered the do’s and don’ts of submitting manuscript queries to literary agents. For one day, editors and agents submitted their input via Twitter and using this particular keyword to connect the posts. People using Twitter’s search function could plug in the keyword to see the expanded group conversation. Such an exercise allowed for better exposure for these accounts…one editor reported later on her Twitter account that she gained over 100 followers in one day thanks to this!

Of course, there is no guarantee participation in a group micro-blogging conversation will reap hundreds of followers to your account in a short time, but use of the tool increases your exposure. It’s only a matter of hitting the right keywords at the time your target audience is searching for those same words. Social media tools like Twitter may not wholly replace the blog, the pay per click model, and link building as the be-all and end-all of SEO, but it is a good complement to your efforts provided it is used smartly.

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