Buzzfeed is a site that has been rapidly growing. What began as a fun place to share humorous content has expanded to the point where it is actually considered for serious journalism and analysis now in some cases. According to the most recent reports, BuzzFeed has recently been raking in over 7 billion viewers per month. With numbers like that this is a site that should very much be on any internet marketer's radar, and if you haven't looked into it for your own marketing then you're missing out on a big opportunity. Right here and now it's certainly worth your time and a great place to generate leads.
Using BuzzFeed for Promotion
So what is BuzzFeed? Well according to their own FAQ, Buzzfeed is a place for you to 'discover, share and track everything awesome that is happening on the internet as soon as it happens'. In other words, it's similar to Reddit or Digg (the old Digg) and is a great place to find interesting stories or share yours with others.
How and What to Post
To post to BuzzFeed, all you need is an account and a good idea for a post. Buzzfeed accepts images, videos and lists of images or media - so popular posts are often things like photos from the set of new films, countdowns of amusing animal pictures or lists of strange facts. You can annotate these too, and that's often what will make your post interesting and engaging to visitors (but it can also get your post rejected if you struggle with spelling and editing…).
Now already your marketing brain should be starting to whir as you think of all the things you could post that might help you to promote your site. You could post all kinds of lists and articles that people will be certain to want to read and then just include a link back to your site right? Wrong - actually posting links to your own site or blog is something that BuzzFeed advise against:
'…spam [and] links to your blog. Don't post these things as they will likely result in the removal of your account…'
On the other hand though, the FA also says that you can post things 'you have made' and that are likely to go viral. So you can post things you've made, but not links to blogs… okay so that's not entirely clear but there are ways we can work with this.
How to Promote
So if you can't post links to your blog, how do you go about promoting your business and generating leads? Well first of all, the guidelines say nothing about promoting your brands - as long as there's not a link in there. So you could quite easily post a list of the 'Top Ten Ways to Travel' and include your own limousine company as the number one for instance and this would still increase your brand awareness. Likewise, you could make a video that you intend to go viral that promotes your business and there would be no reason not to share that too.
any value beyond simple marketing hype then you're not going to get anything published and in all likelihood you'll eventually end up with a useless account.
The key to success then is to think of great posts you can share first and only then to worry about how you're going to tie them in to your marketing. At the same time you should also spend at least some of your time posting things that aren't marketing related at all - this way you'll gradually build up a better reputation and you might even become a Top 100 User - at which point anything you post will automatically be published in the 'Just Launched' section of the site giving you a huge guaranteed exposure every time.
Learning From BuzzFeed
There is also a lot to learn from BuzzFeed’s success for any marketer. BuzzFeed has reached the point it is at interestingly without emphasis on SEO. BuzzFeed credits all its success to social media and publishing highly sharable and viral content. The copy is written clearly for a youthful audience that has time to spend on Google. It is almost always humorous, but also intelligent. It makes great use of images and clickbait-esque titles (without going fully down that road) - Watch and learn.
