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I’m sure you’ve read several articles warning you to be extremely careful when promoting your own stuff on social media sites. The risk of being labeled as a spammer varies from “high” to “get-out-of-here-and-die-right-now” in most cases, unless you know what you’re doing. And those articles aim to teach you exactly the do’s and don’ts of social media marketing.

But do you know what? Not everyone will see you necessarily as a spammer when you plug your own content.

I get disappointed when I visit del.icio.us, click on “links for you” and never ever find anything. Not even actual spam! No one cares to share their bookmarks with me. Things are slightly better at StumbleUpon: once in a blue moon I receive a few links from friends and fans. Still, not nearly as many as I’d be interested in.

Being a voracious reader, and not having the time to keep track of everything that happens on the Internet, I’m pretty open to pitches — provided that they’re related to my areas of interest, of course.

Am I the only social media user who feels this way? I don’t think so. On the other hand, this post reflects exclusively my point of view. That is, I haven’t exchanged ideas with other people before writing it. Keep this in mind if you decide to try any of the tips below.

How can you promote your content to interested social media peers? Six random ideas:

1. Digg users have an obvious tool: the so-called shouts. Many have been abusing it though. What’s worse, some people send several shouts a day to their contacts, but don’t accept shouts from anyone. Do *not* follow their example. If you want to send messages, you should be open to receive some as well. It’s simple like that.

2. LiveJournal has just released a private message system. This is an old GreatestJournal feature, by the way. But both sites are friendship-oriented, i. e., you should join them to build actual relationships, not just to put your marketing ideas into practice. Otherwise you’ll be ignored by almost all users.

3. If you are a stumbler, you’d better send links only to your friends. If you’re bold and/or confident that your content would be of interest to any given stumbler who isn’t your mutual friend (yet), you can send him/her a polite private message and pitch your site/blog/photo/whatever. But good results aren’t guaranteed.

4. By MySpace’s standards my friends list is very small. Yet I receive much more bulletins than I’m able to read, so I skip over 95% of them. But I rarely receive any personal messages. Consequently, I always read the few ones I get. The same goes for comments. Hopefully you got the idea.

5. If you keep your bookmarks at del.icio.us, you may play a bit with the “for:username” tag. Unfortunately, many members overlook that feature and don’t seem to ever check the links they get. Another problem lies in the impossibility to send any messages along with your links. The ability to add a “personal touch” to your link sharing attempts might make a difference, if it existed.

6. You should try to promote video content to YouTube users. I know, I know… You must be laughing at me and saying that this is just too obvious to deserve a mention on this article. You must be right. But please tell me one thing: why *none* of the PMs I get on YouTube deal with online videos? Well, maybe some people think that after watching so many videos, their targets won’t be interested in even more. This must be why they choose to promote things that have absolutely nothing to do with YouTube’s speciality. Yeah… sure.

Three additional tips:

a) Don’t overdo it. Just because a social media user is deeply interested in a certain topic and/or is in your friends list, it doesn’t mean he/she has to be informed about each and every thing you publish on the Internet (some microblogging enthusiasts might totally disagree with such statement, but that’s another story). Be specially careful if you want to promote your blog’s articles, because some of your contacts may be regular visitors and/or feed subscribers. Therefore, they’ll be more likely to get annoyed if you send them links to things that they would have read anyway. Oh, and in case you use to rewrite your posts and submit them to article directories, do your friends a favour: don’t pitch your rewritten stuff to them. Unless you have among your contacts some people who’d be interested in studying rewriting techniques.

b) Many social news and social bookmarking sites are too generic. As a result, their members tend to have a long list of unrelated interests. If you find members who stick to a group of related topics, and the stuff you want to promote incidentally fits their specific tastes, you’ll be less prone to rejection. Before you say anything about those niche-oriented social media sites, let me draw your attention to a potential issue: people inside the same niche tend to react more aggressively to any attempts of self-promotion. It may be due to a stronger “sense of competition” or to a “specialised information overload.” So, it might not be necessarily safer to plug your content on such sites. Those fellows who try to specialise in certain topics even when they are members of general social media sites may be better targets. You might help them fish more specialised content from a sea of miscellaneous links. And they might be grateful to you for this.

c) If you really are too afraid of being called a spammer and you fear to lose some (or many) friends, there’s a very simple way to go about this, as long as you’ve already opened accounts on some social media sites and your friends lists aren’t totally empty. Here’s what to do: select the desired site and send a message to each person in your contact list, explaining your intentions. Tell them you’d like to send them some links from time to time. Specify the frequency: everyday, twice per week, once a week etc. Also specify the type of links you’ll be sharing, and make it clear that they will lead to content produced by you (or by your partners, depending the case). Ask whether they would be interested in getting such links or not. The answers will probably vary from a dry “no, thanks” to a very specific “please send me only your links about writing prompts, preferably on Fridays.” Take notes and respect everyone’s decisions. This is fair play applied to social networking. And it comes with a bonus: by following this tip you’ll be able to build your own informal newsletter(s) inside each site.

Cool resources:

* In case you need more info and advice on social media leveraging, DoshDosh is the place you’re looking for. Maki often writes in-depth articles on the subject, and they are all so good that I won’t even try to pick any examples. Just go there and use the blog’s search bar. You’ll probably find even more tips than you expect. And no, Maki hasn’t paid me a single penny to advertise his site. I just happen to be a big fan of his.

* Another blog you’ll want to visit is Vandelay Website Design. Despite the site’s name, design is just one of the subjects covered by Steven Snell. He also writes a lot about site promotion, for instance, and social media is often mentioned in his posts. By the way, he is the person who inspired me to write this article, as this is my contribution to his Social Media Group Writing Project. Click here to view the complete list of submitted articles.

And that’s all… for the moment. I may get back to this subject if you ask me to (and even if you don’t :-P). Feel free to post questions, share experiences, offer different points of view and so on.