5 Dominant Techniques in Social Media Marketing

Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou

Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.

Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.

His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.

TEDxLausanne · Gamification to Improve Our World17 min

5 Dominant Social Media Marketing Techniques

After helping a variety of companies with their social media marketing campaigns in the past 2 years, I noticed that social media marketing narrows down to a few dominant techniques that work well and produce results.

However, a big problem in the industry is that most people just think about Social Media Marketing as one big technique, and without understanding what they truly want, they pay consultants (mostly self-proclaimed experts who have never driven an ROI for companies) to help them do this social media marketing thing that everyone says is essential.

The result is unsurprisingly disappointing because every company, every budget, and every goal requires different social media marketing techniques. If you are a low budget company looking to get tons of traffic in one month, you can’t make online video shows every day like Gary Vaynerchuk did because even the great GaryVee took two years to make it big. If you hire a “social media expert” to run a blog and Twitter account for you, you will quickly lose faith in social media because they’re not going to get you 100K visitors in a month by just doing that.

Different companies with different goals should have different social media marketing techniques

This is a serious pain in the industry because social media marketing is something that works and can be powerful, but most people (companies and consultants alike) have a lot of misconceptions regarding the different strategies and how they should be used.

In this post, I attempt to break social media marketing down into 5 Main Techniques. In that way, if you are a company, you can ask your social media experts to do a Social Media Targeting Campaign, instead of just a vague Social Media Marketing Campaign. If you are a consultant, make sure your client knows what you are doing for them and what results they can expect.

Through my Octalysis Framework, I’ve come to understand that all human motivation can be mapped to 8 Core Drives. Each of these social media techniques activates different Core Drives, which is why no single approach works for every goal.

Social Media Marketing Technique 1: SM Brand Management

This is the most common technique that the “experts” promise to do. This includes creating and maintaining a blog and social media accounts, engaging people who are interested, sharing valuable things in your industry, and eventually building up followers, visitors, and trust. It might even involve maintaining a Facebook Page (not effective if you DO NOT already have a strong brand established) or a LinkedIn group.

This technique is effective because it fully utilizes the SOCIAL part of social media. You are out there engaging your target audience. You are making friends with them and creating value for them. You are building your own popularity and trust. If someone knows what you do and thinks positively of you, when they need your product or services, they will not go on Google and find a random service they don’t know. They will buy it from you. If their friends are looking for services you offer, they will refer their friends to you.

In Octalysis terms, Brand Management activates Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness. People buy from those they trust and feel connected to.

The problem with Social Media Brand Management is that it takes time, patience and persistence. Since you are not out there to close deals but to build trust, you won’t see an immediate increase in sales or signups. It’s only when people really trust you and care about you do they start to check out your stuff, and that could take months to years to build.

Companies who consistently pressure their Social Brand Building workers to self-promote, get traffic, and get sales will hurt themselves in the long run and fail in social media marketing. They clearly do not understand that this technique was not appropriate for their 1 month ROI agendas.

Pros: Engages your target market. Builds trust. Leads to sustainable success.
Cons: Slow. Takes a lot of time. Need to care about your audience.
When to use: When you have a long-term vision of your brand and social influence on the internet, and you can dedicate at least one long-term person who understands what it takes to be popular online and engage with your target audience.
End Result: Brand

Social Media Marketing Technique 2: SM Targeting

Social Media Targeting is where you find individuals on social media platforms one by one and engage them about your services. This includes finding and messaging people on X (formerly Twitter) based on their description or keyword posts, contacting someone directly on LinkedIn for a B2B sale, or commenting on a blogger’s post.

Social Media Targeting is probably the most direct way of social media marketing. In one sense, it is like sales. If someone posts “I need a plumber in Vancouver…” you immediately reply with “We’re in Vancouver and would love to help you out!” If someone complains about your competitor, you reach out about yourself. X is usually the best tool for Social Media Targeting for B2C businesses. If you sell corporate solutions, you would utilize LinkedIn to locate the decision makers and approach them. This can yield short-term and effective results, depending on how much time you put into it.

The problem with Social Media Targeting is that, if not done carefully, it could be seen as spam. If you contact 200 people in a day, and you are NOT being a hero to them by providing them exactly what they need, they will view you as a spammer. Yes, the spamming industry makes a lot of money, but once you are identified as a spammer, it would completely destroy the long efforts you have put in for Social Media Brand Management and ruin your reputation.

On top of that, your accounts might be flagged or get deleted. Make sure your Social Media Targeting operator understands how to provide what people are looking for, not overload them with irrelevant services.

Another problem to Social Media Targeting is that it is not as scalable. By nature of this technique you are contacting one person at a time. Even though the conversion rate and ROI is high for this, it is difficult to execute it on a massive scale without many dedicated employees just doing this.

Pros: Direct. Immediate results. Measurable ROI.
Cons: Risk of being spam. Could hurt reputation. Difficult to scale.
When to use: When you are looking for short-term results while not being too concerned with long-term branding. You also need a dedicated person who understands social media etiquette in order to not become spammy.
End Result: Sales/Conversions

Social Media Marketing Technique 3: Marketing Gamification

Marketing Gamification is when you create your own viral content that usually indirectly promotes your brand or services. This includes creating a viral video, hosting a competition, or creating a novel site that’s just to get peoples’ attention. Some examples are the T-Mobile Plaza Dance, Dikembe Mutombo’s 4 1/2 Weeks to Save the World, and Compare The Meerkat.

The difficult thing about Marketing Gamification is that it is usually a bigger-scaled campaign (hence more expensive), and the odds of it turning viral are low. Few “social media consultants” offer this service (most blog posts lie in the Social Brand Building realm), as it usually takes an organized professional firm to coordinate the entire thing. This also usually needs to be accompanied with the rest of the social media techniques to create the full effect.

This technique connects to Core Drive 7: Unpredictability & Curiosity. Viral campaigns succeed because they contain an unexpected twist that people feel compelled to share.

With Marketing Gamification, if it becomes viral, you are able to reach millions of people. However, when people talk about it, they usually don’t talk about the brands but the campaign itself, so make sure the campaign connects to the company itself in one way or another.

Pros: Potential of reaching millions of people. Opens the door to the 2 other techniques below. Creates more buzz than other techniques.
Cons: Larger-scaled. More expensive. Chances of being viral are slim.
When to use: When your company has a deeper pocket and wants to create unique buzz in your industry. It’s also more appropriate for products and services that aren’t interesting by themselves.
End Result: Buzz

Social Media Marketing Technique 4: Social Bookmarking Promotion

Editor’s Note (2026): This section was written in 2012 when social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious were major traffic drivers. Most of these platforms have since shut down or become irrelevant. The modern equivalent of this technique is content distribution through platforms like Reddit, Product Hunt, and Hacker News, which follow the same behavioral principles: user-curated content that can send massive traffic spikes when a post reaches the front page.

Social Bookmarking Sites are services where people share resources via a reference URL instead of the content itself. These sites include Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Delicious and dozens more. The goal for this technique is to get on the front page or get top ranked on these sites, driving tons and tons of traffic to your website.

In order for this to work, two things need to happen. One is that you have content or services that could go viral (so this technique follows the last one). Two is that you need to be able to get the power users of the bookmarking sites to endorse you. This could be a tricky thing to do and will often cost you money.

When you make a hit with social bookmarking sites, the traffic you can get is so high that it sometimes crashes your server (traffic from Digg that crashes your site is called the “Digg Effect”). However, a lot of the times the traffic itself is not very targeted (especially from StumbleUpon), so conversion rates are usually low since no one is looking to buy anything.

This dynamic activates Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience. The limited window of front-page visibility creates urgency for both the content creator and the audience.

Pros: Can drive tons of traffic in a short amount of time.
Cons: Difficult to execute. Untargeted traffic. Low conversion rates and time on site. Usually need to pay even if not successful.
When to use: When you have viral content or services, have some cash to work with, and need to drive a lot of traffic in a short time.
End Result: Traffic

Social Media Marketing Technique 5: SM Influencer Campaign

This is having influencers who are popular bloggers, content creators, and social media figures promote your product or services for you. This is probably the most effective and powerful way of doing social media marketing. The biggest problem with Social Media Brand Management is that it takes too much time to build that trust with the online audience, ranging from months to years. In an Influencer Campaign, you are using the engagement and trust others have built for months and years. This creates the strongest form of traffic because not only can it create hundreds of thousands of visitors, it also has a high brand building and conversion rate since it is through a trusted referral.

To make this happen, marketers need to identify who are the top influencers in their niches and establish relationships with them. Some marketers pay the influencers directly to advertise or sponsor a conversation, some give out free units, and some just give out first dibs to new services. Whatever it is, make sure the creator discloses the relationship to their audience to not get in trouble. Getting through this is a huge pain, but once it is executed well, it is the most effective form of social media marketing for making something go viral (think Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Work Week).

Finally, your product or service must be viral or exciting for this to work well since influencers are putting their reputation on the line and are not going to promote random commodities. If your product or service itself is not special, then be sure to create a unique and outrageous campaign that you want these influencers to write about.

Pros: Generates large amounts of qualified traffic through a medium of trust. Builds a strong brand. Fast results.
Cons: Expensive or time consuming. Risk of influencers refusing to help or writing negative posts about your service or product.
When to use: When your company has a budget, an exciting product, or is launching a unique campaign or competition and needs lots of buzz with targeted traffic onto your site.
End Result: Brand + Traffic + Sales/Conversions

What techniques have you tried and what works best?

Out of these strategies, what have you tried in the past and what works for you? What doesn’t work for you? Are there any more techniques that you can think of? It’s time to leave a message in the comment section.

Related Reading

• The Octalysis Framework: Complete Gamification Framework
• Social Media Marketing ROI: The Numbers You Need to Know
• What is Gamification?
• Books by Yu-kai Chou

WOULD YOU LIKE YU-KAI CHOU TO WORK WITH YOUR ORGANIZATION?