Interview with Neil Patel – Social Media Marketing Consultant

Today, we have with us an interesting personality – Neil Patel, co-founder of ACS.
Neil is a respected authority in the social media arena. He’s a man the industry looks upto for his experience with the social media and seo, which explains why he’s a much sought after Marketing Consultant today.

Thanks Neil for this interview, next time we’ll have an audio one, people always love to listen to you.

1. How did you start with Social Media, when did you recognize the potential and how did you get involved with it?

I got started with social media once I noticed that people were getting thousands of links from sites like Digg.com. The way I got started was by first networking with the top users who were successful on these sites. By interacting with these users they taught me how to leverage the social web so that I could be successful.

2. Which is your personal favorite and which works best for business/clients?

Not sure exactly what the question means, but if you are referring to social sites… then my favorite is Facebook. If you have a successful application on Facebook you can consistently get over 20 million pageviews a month.

Although Facebook is my favorite site, it doesn’t work well with all clients. Due to this, I would have to say that Digg is best for business/clients. It is much easier to leverage Digg than it is to leverage Facebook.

3. Everyone is talking about getting on the front page of Digg and being popular on SU, Is that all to it, or do you think efficiency is measured in any other way on these tools?

It may sound easy, but there is a lot to leveraging Digg and StumbleUpon. Success can be measured by getting on the front page of these sites, but ideally it should be measured by the amount of traffic/links you get.

4. I’ve read that you’ve done something on YouTube as an experiment that taught you the potential of social media (especially with videos), could you explain us what was it and how did it happen?

I have no clue what you are talking about.

Overall YouTube is a great site to leverage. Because of universal search you can create videos and get them ranked for competitive terms on Google.

The only experiments I can recall were faking views to see how many days in a row I could get a video to be number 1 on YouTube. Or how few links you can point to a YouTube video so that it would rank for competitive terms. And lastly, how many users I could force to subscribe to my YouTube channel.

5. Now, big brands like Virgin and Coke are opting for social media marketing, recognizing the potential of online space. Could you please tell me your thoughts on it?

I think it is great that companies want to embrace the social web. Once more large brands start leveraging it, social media marketing will become more mainstream.

One thing I think many companies don’t realize is that you can’t control what people think of you; especially on social web. Due to this some companies may end up with a sour taste in their mouth.

6. What according to you is a good strategy (generally) for offline retail brands to adopt when they get to the online space? (Like Nike)

I think it is good for companies to adopt it when they get into the online marketing space. But before they try and jump in, they need to try and understand how it works.

7. Personally I believe Social Media Optimization is dead. Agree/ Disagree – what are your thoughts on it Neil?

I don’t think it is dead. I think it has just really started to become mainstream. More people are leveraging the social web and more companies and getting budgets for social marketing.

8. Digg, SU, Sphinn, Mixx now there are lot of them and each has a typical character to it considering the user behavior – If I were to ask you to match these sites with a particular crowd, how would it be? Ex: – Digg = Geeks?

I wish it was as easy as Digg = Geeks, but as these sites keep on evolving more people are starting to leverage them. Due to this it is hard to say that one persona type uses each site. For example on Digg people who are into politics also love the site and in many cases these users are not geeks.

9. Are there any “loop holes” available in the Digg system still? We’ve heard you knew a couple of them earlier.

Not really anymore. There are still things you can do like build powerful accounts or network with other members, but the best loop hole is to write great content. Sadly, writing good content isn’t much of a loop hole.

10. Suppose “Mani Karthik of DailySEOblog” is a new entry to the online space, what would you recommend as a strategy to me to get popular on the social media.

Best advice I could give is writing really detailed content such as how to guides. Things that are timeless usually do well and build the most links

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