Social Media – Who’s It For?

My SEO Manchester friends and I on occasionally, get down the pub for a few pints and go over some FAQ’s, Tips and generally talk about our industry. I thought we’d go a little social today.

The use of Social Media.

  • To connect with people. Reach the people where they are in the way they are used to.
  • Keep brand positioning. Keep brand awareness to relay offline marketing campaigns.
  • Generate more traffic for website
  • Enlarge the targeted segment. Different types of people use different types of media.
  • Increase the use experience, testing and engagement
  • Plus leverage current marketing results, get better brand awareness, get better brand management, get better user stickiness, get better quality products, get more sales.

The requirements for Social Media

  • Global means local. Because we deal with communities we need to be close to them. The communities are still local, if you want to go global, you need to be where they are an in their language.
  • Resources. Community managers need to get more focus.
  • Consistency. The effort should start and last. Be sure to keep users with your community.
  • Content. The content should get more focus and be relevant.

How you can use social media to benefit you in conjunction with or independently of your search marketing campaign?

Social media is really broad – Twitter, IM, Facebook, blogs, etc. We find the most viable part of social media is to increase your visibility, ranking, links to your site, etc.

Lets be honest, as an SEO Company we know all want you guys really want is a website that gets lots of relevant traffic. If you want a Google number one listing, the important factors are: Domain Age –  On Page Factors – links.

Links are much harder to get these days, especially with problems with getting paid links. Social media can really help you here with links, traffic, visibility, and branding.

How it  do it: create content on a section on your site, find specific communities that will react well to your topic (don’t put your political content on a dog site), and engage the people in these communities.People with blogs are looking for content and look at these communities. If you get your content on these sites, you get lots of exposure. People write about you, link to you, even talk to you outside of the web (TV, newspaper). You’re getting two types of links – community links (profiles showing what individuals voted on), and industry sites plus others that write about you. The second type usually has better visitors, and you get long-term influx of links (weeks/months).

Social Media Tips

  • Have a site that is social media friendly. Don’t plug advertising and marketing stuff. A week or so after you’re successful, then you can put advertising back on.
  • Pick communities you relate to. Research these communities, see what communities are appropriate.
  • Check what worked before. Do more research, see what was successful for others in your field.
  • Create high quality content.
  • Understand how to submit and push social campaigns.
  • Understand what to do with success.
  • Be social! Treat it like a real life social event.

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