Social Media “Slow and steady wins the race.”

We all know the story of the tortoise and the hare. If you’ve forgotten the details, it’s a story where the hare makes fun of the slow moving tortoise. In response, the tortoise challenges the hare to a race. The hare is so confident that he can win, he stops for a nap. When he wakes us he finds that the slow moving tortoise, who continued steadily moving towards his goal, has won the race.

Social media marketing requires slow steady effort

What does this have to do with social media and marketing? I expect you’ve already guessed. Social media marketing requires a slow steady effort to achieve results. You have to begin to schedule time for social media—time for reading and learning, time for adding to the discussions already underway and time for creating your own content. I would suggest a minimum of an hour a day, at least three days a week. More is better.

Success Stories via social media

A member of my new social group at Linkedin.com is asking other members to comment on their success with social media for marketing. The results vary from modest—getting better known, to amazing —booking over a 1000 people to a seminar in a couple of days. Of course, if you haven’t developed a network, then no one will be reading your material and those amazing results will not happen.

Sometimes social media success is quick

On the other hand, there can often be some pretty quick results. My ad class students and I set up a blog just two weeks ago, to showcase their work. Since that time we’ve had over a 1100 visitors to our blog. The students were challenged to get traffic to the site by using their usual channels of communication – email, text messaging, Facebook, Orkut, Cyworld (Korean site). In the days after the challenge, our visits increased dramatically, with a high of 222 visits the day after the challenge. It didn’t hurt that there were ten people out there talking about the blog and inviting people to visit.

Google purgatory: get out quick

An added bonus to social networking: google finds you! If you’ve built a garden-variety website and you are in google ‘purgatory’—yes, there really is such a place—you know about being invisible on the web. Well, our blog is already indexed on google. Yup, you can find us on google right now—only two weeks after we built the site.