My Journey Into Social Media - Part 2

Don't forget to read Part 1 in my Journey into Social Media...

I’d fallen into a marketing trap. I did a market survey of one (ie. me) and decided that everyone must be like me and not be particularly interested in social media.

It’s dangerous to make assumptions that aren’t tested and after I’d detangled myself from my preconceptions I stood back and came to the conclusion I was wrong. It’s like a domain traffic investor believing what they’ve always done is the correct path while they watch their revenues plummet…..they’re just wrong. As Einstein said, if you keep on doing the same thing you’ve always done and expect a different result then you’re crazy.

My conclusion is that Social Media is becoming less and less about plates of food, cats, dogs (I’ve now becoming addicted to these….sigh….) and the like and more about communication and the sharing of emotional experiences. I post articles from my blog because they mean something to me and I want to share them. I also post pictures of Roselyn because I love my wife.

What I discovered over the last eighteen months has been you CAN move traffic away from the social networks if it is meaningful. Repeat posting of memes doesn’t cause people to leave Facebook and go to a website……but posting an ongoing story does. The story could be about your life, a book, articles or anything of the sort. The hook is all about more is elsewhere.

As domain investors, we should view social networks more as a launching point to a destination that we control. What we need to understand is a domain is NOT a destination. It’s a placeholder for a destination. What do I mean by this? We need content on our destinations if we are to attract the social generation…..and it’d better be bite sized content because they don’t have much mind-space for anything else.

LifeExplorers.Club is a site that Roselyn and I have setup to write about the adventures we are having in food (lots of photos here), travel (even more photos) and our thoughts on life. It’s also an experiment in social media. You can find LifeExplorers.Club on Instagram and we’re posting every few days at the moment…..you can even follow us. ?

Learning about social should be high on the agenda of every domain investor as it’s impacted everything we do with our domain assets. Participating in social media is not necessarily learning….I would encourage you to really think about what is happening here and some the tectonic shifts that have been occurring in the Internet landscape…..in the meantime, I just have to look at that cat again!