A few weeks ago I decided to conduct a social media experiment to see if I could start a blog from scratch and generate a big enough buzz to get a good discussion going. I was on vacation in Florida and had more time on my hands than I normally do, so I decided to give it a go.
The goal was very simple – to get a decent amount of people to leave comments on the blog post and get an active discussion going. I thought about how I would do this. In fact, I thought about it for a few days, and this is the action plan I came up with.
- Put social media buttons (tweet, share on Facebook, like on Facebook) in prominent places on the blog post.
- Choose a hot topic that people are focused on right now.
- Take a stance that is unpopular.
- Tweet about the article and post a link on Facebook.
- Ask for comments in response to a specific question.
- Be an active participant in the discussion (if one actually starts).
I had come up with this plan by observing sites that I had seen get a massive amount of exposure even though they were relatively new. I knew that it needed to involve a strong social media component because SEO couldn’t have such a quick effect. Since the fastest trending stories these days spread virally because of social media, it made sense to me that this would be the way to go.
One morning, I woke up and felt ready to give it a go. I had been watching the show “The Sing Off” on NBC and was absolutely blown away by the performances. The group that won the grand prize was a group called “Committed”. They are a Christian group that joined the show and made it all the way to the end. However, in my opinion, they had made some compromising decisions about the choice of music they sang.
Now, I really don’t want to make this a debate about what they did, or should have done differently. The purpose of this post was to show how I turned it into an active discussion, one that could be used to give my blog a very quick jump start. Let’s take a look at how I implemented the steps and then think about how you could implement similar steps in your new blog, or to give your older blog a nice boost.
