Posts tagged Media
Will 2011 Be The Year of a Social Media “Bubble?”
As Eric Brown recently reported, a lot of voices in the SEO field are starting to talk about the possibility of seeing a “bubble” around social media in the coming year. We’ve summarized his article for you here and discuss the reasons why this topic is getting so much airtime, one of which is that it falls directly on the heels of the well lauded real estate bubble of 2010.
Weeding
Maybe it’s time for the web to do some social media “weeding” of sorts, that is, get rid of the extraneous sites. Nowadays every business has a social media strategist, a term that’s lost a lot of meaning. This strongly echoes the pervasiveness of subprime loans before the real estate crash.
Easy to get into
When the barrier for entry into a field is low, risks of overexposure is high. When there’s no cost to get in and the reward is guaranteed, much like in low-end real estate ventures, there’s no doubt people will take advantage that see an easy opportunity for gain.
Low cost
Costs of running an internet business are incredibly low, as in, just the price of a laptop, which makes the industry wrought with stragglers. Once real results are required from these start ups, many simply move on to the next client, of which there are many.
Looking for Correction
Like in any business, social media requires that a problem be corrected through the help of experts. Since there wasn’t much of a problem in the first place, results are often easy to manufacture and it’s difficult to measure the success of a true social media campaign.
Social media marketing is much more than Twitter and Facebook…it’s all about engaging consumers, making connections, and thereby increasing sales. With so many companies in this new business, it’s inevitable that some will be weeded out.
Summary by Social Media Expert Extraordinaire Heather Hendrick
5 Easy Ways to Optimize Your Social Media for Ranking
Search Engine Guide put out an interesting bit last year about how to optimize your pages for ranking…it was so insightful for SEOs and multiple web hosting companies we’ve summarized it her for you.
With social media pages now becoming more and more important for online marketing campaigns, SEOs everywhere are trying to figure out how to get their social media pages to rank highly alongside their main brand pages.
Social media is a great way to further dominate the top 10 Google listings for your brand, and additionally for the keywords you hope to target. The idea is that using social media, you can work in some of the keywords you hope to rank highly for, incorporate your own content such as press releases, then fill out the SERP results for those terms.
Here are a few ways to finagle the social media pages you choose to use so that they reflect your intent:
Get More Followers –
The more followers you have via Twitter, Facebook, etc., the more weight your social media page carries for search engines. While the algorithm is hard to discern, it’s important to have lots of relevant followers while at the same time following relevant people yourself. Google will connect the dots here and relate the two web properties.
Optimizing the Pages’ URL and Meta Tags –
Check to see which parts of your page and description are being used as Meta Tags by social media sites and plan your profile accordingly. Don’t waste this valuable chance to claim your meta data the way you want.
Link to Your Own Content –
New content seems to be indexed much faster when it’s linked to on social media sites, so point to your own stuff to get it to show up in SERPS! The added benefit to this is that your content will also gain exposure much more rapidly when it’s been spread virally.
Make Your Updates Count –
Especially important for Twitter, be sure to optimize your Tweets (and any other social media content) so that search engine results show what you want them to. In the case of Twitter, only about the first 30 characters show in results, so use those for your keywords. On Facebook, keep your status updates relevant to your brand as this helps build association for the engines.
Build Links –
When you’re creating a linkbuilding campaign, be sure to include links to your social media pages as well. Inbound links to these sites are extremely valuable, so include them in the header or wherever possible. Be sure to remember that just as with regular SEO, the needs of the user are the first priority. Don’t spam up your social media just because you’re trying to benefit your SEO efforts. Thanks to Heather Hendrick for the summarization
How to Fix Your Social Media Campaigns with Metrics
When crafting a social media campaign, as Jennifer Laycock at Search Engine Guide points out, it’s important to focus on micro goals in order to assess success. Here are a few ways to accomplish that goal…
Seeing What’s Working and What’s not
The best thing about tracking goals on a micro level is the ability to quickly assess which elements of a campaign are successful and which ones aren’t. The great thing about metrics and data is that they help you discover what changes to make, so use them. Line them up with your campaign goals and watch carefully to see if your campaign’s on track.
Find the Problems
Pretend that you’ve just launched a new campaign, complete with social media tie tins, linkbait, and the like and it’s working! Links and visitors are streaming in, but sales are staying flat…what’s going on? If you’ve done a good job of setting metrics before the campaign launched, it should be easy to tell. For example, is engagement (comments, reviews, feedback) down while your visits are up? This could mean your consumers are no longer invested the way you want them to be.
Compare What Happened to What you Wanted to Happen
So you’ve got the visits and hits you were looking for but not the sales to match…what’s wrong? Dig a little deeper to discern the problem, say, that your price point puts you focused at a really small target market. If you were marketing to a broad audience you may have widespread appeal but the number of people willing to actually buy is small. Next time around, it may make more sense to create marketing that’s more focused and accessible to the target.
Metric Variations Mean Something
If you’ve got a metric setup that tells you everything is going the way you planned, that means something. Let’s say your marketing is out, the links and traffic are coming in but you’re just not converting…all signs point to something unexpected. Reviewing this data simply does not match with the results – increased visitors and flat actions don’t make sense, so it’s time to revisit the site. Perhaps the issue is usability – is it hard for customers to act once they see your marketing? Test it! A few nips and tucks to the interface may mean that customers can interact more easily and therefore convert on the site.
You Can’t Fix What’s Not Understood
If you don’t know what metrics to track, you won’t understand what to look for when your campaign falls flat. There are so many different factors that could affect performance, you’ve got to measure them all to even have a chance of determining what needs tweaking. Staying on top of your campaign means staying on top of all metrics, not just conversion.
Thanks to HHendrick for the summary
Setting the Right Micro Goals for Your Social Media Campaign
Search Engine guide’s Jennifer Laycock recently wrote about how to understand the small goals you’ve set for your social media campaign. The article served as a tandem piece about developing goals, breaking them up into smaller pieces, and matching goals to the tactics that work.
The process she described meant starting with one large goal, then breaking that goal up into more manageable pieces, after which you’d determine what media to use to accomplish the goals. After a couple of months you’d evaluate how well you did in accomplishing the goals. This is a good strategy, but a few more details certainly couldn’t hurt.
Understanding the Micro
Micro goals for social media live in the gray area of a campaign, in the space where things can really go right or wrong. People who are generally new to social media focus on these oftentimes, and they consist of things like number of Facebook followers, RSS subscribers, etc. Things like this don’t mean much up front, but when they come together they create a complete campaign for an seo web hosting company.
Setting the Micros
Before you set your goals, you’ll need to decide which social media tools you’re going to employ. After that step, remember that there are some universal goals for each medium that should be met. These include things like Links for your blog, views for Youtube, Fans on Facebook, Retweets on Twitter, etc. You get the picture.
Remember that your goals are going to vary dependent upon your business, and what makes sense to track on a micro level for you may not make sense for another company. The micro goals you track will also change dependant upon the specific larger goals of a campaign.
For example, if you’re trying to get people into your store, Facebook RSVPs are a great way to track involvement. Similarly, if you want to know how many people are interested in your idea, see how many Youtube videos you have viewed. It’s important to sit with a big team and come up with all the different actions a user could possibly take when face to face with your campaign – being prepared helps you avoid surprises.
Thanks for the summary from Heather Hendrick
Social Media’s Three Primary Goals
Jennifer Laycock recently wrote a great piece about how to use Social Media in an attempt to accomplish specific goals, not just because everyone and their brother has a social media campaign. We thought it was informative, so here’s a quick summary.
The three basic social media goals are: To build and strengthen your brand, to increase conversion, or to increase your presence. Beginning so high level then working down is a good way to hone in on specific, accomplishable goals.
Goal One: Building the Brand
Social media is one of the best marketing tools available for emerging brands, particularly if your product is not exclusive or if you don’t wish to compete solely on price alone. Social media allows you to both introduce your product to specific audiences while at the same time engaging them in a focused conversation.
When you begin your social media campaign, consider what unique value proposition you have to offer your clients, then play on that. Target specific niches to gain customers in the field you’re aiming for. Tweet to them and begin a conversation among their group around your product or service.
Goal Two: Driving Conversion
One of the great abilities of social media is that it can drive goals and interactions with your product. The first step is to write down all the possible options customers have when engaging with your site such as buying the product, signing up for the newsletter, or even subscribing to your RSS feed. Decide which of these interactions you can drive by specifically marketing your social media efforts and aim for that goal. This is often the best and easiest way to get your social media campaign off the ground.
Goal Three: Increase Your Brand Presence
Here’s the biggest and vaguest of all social media goals, and it centers around increasing conversation about your brand. Social media is ripe for the picking by PR minded companies who desire to know what customers are saying about their brand, so use it to your advantage.
The best thing about social media is that it makes all these conversations trackable. You’ve got metrics at hand to measure how much buzz has been built about a new product release and you can really get specific on what you’re measuring, which will help you drive your future goals. The questions to ask yourself are who do you want to find talking about your brand? What do you want them saying? Who do you want them to be saying it to?
If you’re just getting off the ground, these three goals are a good way to start defining your social media campaign. Use them as a baseline to help determine what you need to do to build your brand, increase conversion, and up your presence and exactly how to get there.
Heather Hendrick, summary
PubCon: Thinking Big for Link Building Through Social Media
Out in Las Vegas at PubCon, Mike McDonald of WebProNews spoke with Eric Enge, who was one of the speakers at the session entitled “Real-World Low-Risk, High-Reward Link Building Strategies.” You might be familiar with Enge. He’s been a WebProNews blog partner for some time. He’s the StoneTemple Consulting guy, and he’s developed a reputation over the years as a reputable source for information about link building. In fact, that’s one of StoneTemple’s areas of expertise, along with SEO site evaluation, social media marketing, blog implementation, PPC, web analytics, and local SEO among other things.
At this session, Enge talked about how companies should “Think Big” in order to get the most out of their link building strategies through social media. Mike caught up with him and talked about this subject a little bit more outside of the session.
Other link building advice Enge discussed at the session included:
- Studying what has worked before
- Writing compelling articles
- Write an interesting description
- Voting for posts in front of you on the upcoming pages
- Making sure you stand out!
Organic Search, Relevant Content, Strategy
In this video, Josh from Run Level Media discusses the importance of properly labeling, tagging, and using files names for media on your site. Developing a content strategy, and watching your analytics so you know what to optimize for. Develop a content strategy to keep sites fresh, relevant, and attractive for crawlers.
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