Using SEO in Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social media marketing is everywhere, and if you listen to the “experts” it’s the new face of the marketing world. What then, is an SEO marketer to do? The simple answer is to combine the two. SEO and social media marketing are really just two powerful weapons in the marketer’s arsenal, after all.

SEO and social media marketing are two forms of so-called “inbound” marketing. For those readers who aren’t familiar with all the technical terms of the marketing world, inbound marketing is anything that the customer goes to, as opposed to outbound marketing that goes out to the customer. So, SEO articles and other optimized content such as web pages are part of the inbound marketing crowd. Social media marketing also runs with that crowd, as customers find blogs, Facebook and Twitter accounts, YouTube videos and all the other boys in the band that is social media marketing.

SEO is used in conjunction with social media marketing then to pack a double power punch. Not optimizing social media content is like loading the gun with rubber bullets. If a customer or potential client can’t find your great social media content via search engines, what good is it? If a customer or potential client doesn’t realize that the great social media content they are reading or watching or following is your brand, what’s the point? Using SEO tactics along with your creative and awe-inspiring social media content is putting the hollow-point, full metal jacketed shells in the gun. It says you mean business and you intend to blow your competition away!

Using SEO with blog post content is relatively easy. You simply use all your best SEO strategies when writing the post – keywords, density, themed SEO content, backlinks, etc. Optimizing other social media content may take a bit more work and creativity. Strategically building a social web presence that promotes sharing of content and audience participation isn’t an overnight operation. You have to begin by knowing your client base and what types of social content they prefer using. Once you get your customers playing along, joining in and generating some buzz, your battle is half over, as the search engines will pick up on all that chatter and name dropping. Then, your rankings will start to climb.

Using SEO strategies without some sort of social web presence isn’t too smart in today’s marketing world, either. Your wonderfully optimized content isn’t much of a tour de force without the power of social media behind it anymore. The inbound links from all that sharing, voting and commenting literally can’t be bought! Your devoted fans generate more and more fans as they unknowingly target other members of your audience just like themselves. The exposure and traffic they can provide is invaluable to your marketing efforts – it’s word of mouth marketing at its finest.

SEO and social media marketing shouldn’t and really can’t, be seen as separate entities. One without the other is leaving half your troops in reserve. Combining the two makes the best sense in today’s tough marketplace minefield.

Business Blogs and Social Media Should Work Together

Before Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and the hundreds of other social networking sites existed, individuals and businesses used blogs as a way to share and express their thoughts. In fact, blogs can be thought of as the original social media. The whole point of blogging was to get others to read the content, comment on it, and start a conversation. Sound familiar? In recent years blogging has lost some momentum as people spend more time using “sexier” social media platforms. Businesses are being told that they need to be active on social networks in order to succeed and in an effort to catch up and make the medium work for them, have left their blogs dormant for months at a time. This is a huge mistake since social media should not replace blogging. While social media and blogging may serve similar purposes, they aren’t the same. Both are necessary parts of an integrated online marketing campaign and operating a business blog can give your social media efforts a boost and vice versa.

Social media is important for many reasons. First, it’s where the people are. Millions of people sign in to social media accounts every day to connect, share, and find information. It’s Marketing 101 that you want to be where your target audience is. An active business social media account page helps build a brand and establish loyalty and trust over time. It allows a place for businesses of all sizes to engage in a dialogue with current and potential clients or customers. Social media is a focus group and customer service outlet all in one. In addition, social media data now has search engine ranking implications. The search engines take note of social signals such as Likes, Comments, Shares, Re-Tweets, +1’s, etc. Trust plays a large role in search engine ranking and the search engines use these social signals as indicators of that trust. The thought is that a link that gets passed around in social media must be valuable, which is one reason why it’s so important to share quality content with your social followers. Where does this content come from? You guessed it. It comes from your blog.

Social media is great for having conversations and sharing content, but in order to really take advantage of it you need to be sharing your own content! This can include everything from press releases, articles, whitepapers, infograhics, e-books, and guides but as long as you are actively contributing posts to your blog on a regular basis you will continually have fuel for your social media strategy. Consumers very rarely make a purchase or decide to do business with a company before conducting some research. It’s the content that you create that provides them with the answers that they need. Depending on the industry, the sales cycle can be extremely long. Writing blog posts to share with social media followers can establish trust over time.

Ditching a business blog to concentrate on social media is a mistake. Sure, you can share content in social media but you are at the mercy of the social network. That content isn’t owned by you and there are certain limitations. Do you think that 140 characters is enough space to explain your position on a given topic or outline your business strategies to potential clients? A business blog is your property. You can do whatever you’d like with it.

There is a place for both social media and blogging within an online marketing campaign. A good strategy will integrate the two in order to achieve more links, improve SEO, and gain more visibility over time.

About the Author:

Nick Stamoulis is the President and Founder of Brick Marketing, a Boston SEO agency. For more information please call 781-999-1222 or visit http://www.brickmarketing.com.

How much is your brand worth? How can you boost that value? How much time will that take? You may wonder what strategy is best for a small business, a startup, or a Fortune 500 company. I’m sorry to say, I have no secret strategy to double your brand value. But just good old commonsense can do a lot when it comes to branding.

Try Social Marketing
One of the newest strategies for increasing brand value – and of just getting noticed in the first place – is with Facebook. Why not Twitter or LinkedIn or MySpace? It depends on the amount of time you have. If you lack the necessary time to publish info across every social network, first off, you can often connect them (like connecting your Facebook page to your Twitter account); second, you don’t necessarily have to. Facebook has the most users. If you want to connect to the most potential clients with the least amount of effort, Facebook is smart. But building a following does take time; don’t expect your website traffic to double in days.

Are You Asking Buyers Questions?
Sometimes the best businesses simply ask buyers what they want, or sometimes even better yet, what they don’t want. Domino’s Pizza ran some ads a few years back where they had testers explaining their pizza tasted like cardboard, along with some other nasty comparisons. Domino’s recorded this video, then redesigned the pizzas and came back to the same people who denounced their pizzas, and changed their minds. Domino’s has continued this tactic, now showing footage from a real focus group. While you don’t need a million dollar TV commercial campaign, sometimes you can learn more from unhappy customers than the happy ones.

Give Something for Nothing
If you try Facebook, depending on your brand, you may also try giving away some freebies. Some marketers give discounts if you like their Facebook page or hold sweepstakes for fans. Others post free content on their Facebook page so more prospects start following them.

Be Colorful
Different colors symbolize different things and can actually evoke certain emotions in people. A recent study pointed out the most popular brand colors were blue and red. Oddly enough, your brand colors have an affect on prospects. This includes your logo, any pictures of products, and pictures of employees. While this may seem overtly simple, sometimes the best way to re-brand your business may include adding color.

Why Always Sell?
If you want to build a brand, you must be a master salesman, right? While salesman helped build our advertising foundations, so did those who treated this as more than a business. Sometimes it’s the life style you are selling, rather than the product. Sometimes one email a week instead of 10 is enough. Often you can close a sale without lowering your price, but asking some questions. The point is, take off your sales hat every now and then. Get creative and have fun.

Be Valuable
You want to be what Seth Godin calls a “Lynchpin,” where you give freely and build value over time. If you follow the above tips, you may increase your brand value and your value to buyers. If you only take, take, take, if you offer no fun or specials, if you don’t differentiate yourself and show personality, others will.

Where do you begin to become what, as Seth Godin puts it, a “lynchpin,” someone of true value? For our ends, how can you show true value to your customers?

You might try content marketing. Content marketing is a bit of a broad term for us to use, but consider that many brands are created solely on brand value and content marketing. Take, for example, eBay and Amazon who email new offers and products to valued customers daily and who engage in building up the brand with strong customer service.

Customer Service
Through strong customer service, eBay entices big value sellers into using more of its services by pointing out a service that will increases bids by this amount, informing sellers how to open up their own storefront and more. EBay uses content heavy resources like help guides, emails, and blog content to sell these services.

Social Media
Social media marketing is a tool for more than simply creating buzz. You can become indispensable by hooking your followers up with unique tips and info. The problems inherent in social marketing can contradict themselves: you are supposed to personalize your message, but you don’t want to become too personal and separate from the product. Explaining how your dog is sick can be a waste of time, but showing how your customer sold 500 products doing this with your service, and including a link – that’s creating value.

Don’t Over Sell
You can avoid big sales pitches and long speeches – you can focus on benefits. The problem with many of us who are trying to give value to customers is we become too “salesy,” spamming them when it’s not necessary. You may not send 100 emails to a valued customer, but a few more personal messages. Rather than sounding like the latest infomercial, be a person – be personable. That’s one way to create unique messages that will standout from the spam.

Choose the Right Customers
Ultimately, your customers choose you, but you can choose to communicate with the most valuable ones. By prioritizing your time and spending it on the most receptive customers, you can strengthen the relationships that are really going to benefit your company. Building lasting relationships with clients can take a lot of time, so knowing which ones to spend it on can be very important.

Choose the Right Employees
Finally, to become more valued by your customers, who you choose to represent your service is also important. Hire employees who understand the ideas above, or who are willing to learn.

You need not reinvent the wheel with your strategies to become indispensable. Amazon simply emails customers new products based on their previous purchases. Simple and automated, yet it provides customers with a value few other companies offer.

By: Shannon Hooley

MySpace is pulling out of the Social Media race and instead placing its efforts into what MySpace is known for, MySpace Music. Instead of using MySpace to connect with friends or share photos of you and your friends from last weekend, MySpace’s main use will be to find new music, critique movies, chat about TV shows and much more. The emphasis will be placed on connecting with bands from local artists to well known stars. This is a niche MySpace feels has yet to be exercised to its fullest extent.

What Has Changed?
MySpace will have a completely redesigned user interface. This revamp is expected to get rid of the negative connotation attributed to MySpace’s boxy and cluttered looking interface, as well as draw in their target audience which is the 13 – 35 year olds.

The transformation will begin tonight but will last through November, so users should expect to see some changes happening rather soon.

Still Not Convinced?
If you are one of those people who have been holding out on joining MySpace, now might just be the right time to hop back on the bandwagon. The user experience may possibly prove to not be the same MySpace high school students used to post pictures of themselves in mirrors; rather it may establish a vital hub used to discover entertainment news.

What Can You Expect?
If all goes according to plan, MySpace will be a fundamental tool to figure out if a movie is worth seeing, if the opening act for the concert you’re attending will be worth getting there early to listen to, or if you should make time to watch a new TV series.

This new MySpace may well prove to be a great source for finding new local bands that otherwise you would not have heard of. Although you have always been able to find local bands, this new makeover could prove to drive more traffic to MySpace, therefore increasing the number of local bands who sign up for the site.

Only time will tell if this new MySpace venture will be a good decision for the site, or if the changes aren’t enough to save the site. We are excited to see what this new site will do for the company and users everywhere.

Content has always been a very important part of marketing. You strive to create compelling content that will actually be read by your target audience. Marketing today can’t be complete with out social content. Put best by Sonia Simone of Copy Blogger, “Social media didn’t create content marketing, but it’s an unsurpassed tool for getting it distributed.” In other words, partnering content marketing with social media is one of the best available strategies for creating interest.

Partners in Effective Marketing
Why do you need customers? That’s a more obvious question. If you want to sell to a buyer, you need a store front. Copy Blogger refers to this as your “Tribe,” the people who will be visiting and hopefully returning.  Obviously, when you’re conducting business online you need customers just as much as a brick-and-mortar establishment. But when no ones ever heard of you, getting customers to your door can be difficult.

That’s where social marketing comes into play, by allowing you to reach a customer base in the hundreds of millions. Facebook alone can increase your lead base by 300 million.

Content marketing works is because it allows you to reach buyers on many different levels. It creates brand awareness. Partnered with social media, you can create the relevant information needed to sell your products or services.

But social marketing does not always work. It’s rare you’ll have 10,000 fans on Facebook buying nothing, but without the correct content, that just might happen. Without relevant content to put behind your social media, you can have thousands of fans and followers and still sell nothing. The biggest mistake with social content is failing to understand your buyers.

Know Your Buyers
Content marketing and social marketing can both work when you actually put time and effort into knowing who is buying and why. Knowing who you are selling to and why people are buying from you can tell you a lot about your company: it may prove your product is valued, or your social marketing messaging is effective, or that you simply offer great customer service. It can help you grow your customer base, figure out who else to sell to and how to best position your product.

Content marketing partnered with social media is not a ground breaking idea. It’s a logical one. It allows you to better understand who is buying, why they are buying, and how you can sell even more.

In a recent article on AdAge.com, several “players” on the social scene argued where media agencies would go in the future, how they would evolve. The result was a large amount of unique and relevant ideas specifically on social marketing, if not the entire media marketing field in general. So how can you and your business become a player in the new social web?

Evolve Online
Too many of us get stuck on one unique technology, when only months later something bigger and better comes along. Maybe that is the nature of the business. Where was social media 10 years ago? Where was the internet 50 years ago? On the other hand, where were the major markets? All these things evolved, and it’s important to understand why and prepare strategies to capitalize.

Affects of the Social Web On Consumers
In the Ad Age article, one person notes how media agencies must adapt. Consumer focused marketing will control how brands are built. While Twitter and Facebook have potential, they have more potential when consumers control. If a virus spreads, it can spread fast. It’s important to acknowledge this idea and to encourage it, because online consumers are the real marketing players.

Future of Social Media
Where will social media be in 10 years? 20 years? With iPhones and iPads now making portable social communication even more common, the world, so small already, is just closing in. However you choose to market, developing strategies for adapting to social changes is crucial. The future will likely be from various sources, but true marketing changes are created by talent. Talent is what drives marketing.

What’s Your Plan?
Developing a strategy is crucial in building anything from search engine ranking to a following on Facebook. Developing a contact strategy in social media, for example, should go beyond your pages and messages. Many of the marketing strategies used before social media came along — namely email marketing and SEM – are still very relevant.

Who Can Help?
Talent will be the driving force in who becomes a player in the future of social marketing. Talent is what has always driven innovation in marketing. Instead of listening to sales pitches from your employees, you may consider looking at your ideal buyers and what they are doing. As noted earlier, developing a way to have users market for you – spreading links to YouTube videos – can be of more value than a TV commercial.

Get to Know Other Players
Finally, communicate, offer value, share your insights. This blog post put together many opinions; your social web strategy should too.

Part 3:  How can I harness the power of Social Media Marketing?

To answer this critical question, we need to start by understanding that the social media landscape is at best chaotic, made up of a number of elements, and continually evolving.  Here is a thumbnail sketch, a current “snap shop” of how I see the social media landscape.

The Elements:

• Social Networks like MySpace, Facebook & Classmates.com – enable users to make and find “friends”, express who they are with pictures, music, etc., keep up and reconnect with old classmates and friends

• Video Sharing Sites like YouTube & Flickr – enable users to manage and share their photos

• Social Directories like iTunes (podcasts), Best of the Web (blogs), iBlogBusiness (business blogs), and iBizRadio (business podcasts) – make social media like blogs and podcasts available on the Internet

• Networking Sites like LinkedIn & Merchant Circle – enable people to strengthen and extend their networks and contacts

• Bookmarking Sites like del.icio.us and Digg – allow people to discover and share content

• Social Media like blogs, micro-blogs (Twitter), audio/video/photographic media, and podcasts

I provided the above list to enable just a glimpse of what’s available in the social media landscape.  It is not intended to be a complete list, but just a sample of some of the most popular sites and technologies.  So, now that we’ve taken a glimpse of the social media landscape, let’s discuss how to proceed to harness its power for business success.

One size doesn’t fit all.

A company’s social media marketing (much like a public relations or multi-media advertising campaign using Internet/TV/radio/print) has to be carefully planned, including defining objectives and measuring success.  In addition, some of the most successful companies using Social Media Marketing (such as Disney and Frito-Lay) are combining Social Media Marketing with their other traditional and online marketing thrusts.  The key elements of a social media marketing plan would be guided by the company’s objectives and typically include one or more of the following:

• Establishing the company’s presence in key Social Media Networks, such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.  I feel it is critical to set up a profile to claim your company name before someone else does.

• Utilizing social media “tools,” such as blogs, podcasts, viral video, viral articles, and “widgets” (i.e. small software applications intended to spread virally).

• Building a social “community” for the company’s products and services in key social media networks.

• Upgrading the company’s Website to include a Media News Room (i.e. links to its social media networks, online videos & podcasts; blogs; a LinkedIn invitation; del.icio.us and Digg bookmark links and press releases and articles).  In effect, the Media News Room becomes an expanded version of what many Websites currently call the “News Room”, which typically only provided content on its traditional media services.

• Measuring results – such as downloads of a viral video or podcast, blog subscribers, Twitter followers, “friends” on Facebook or a  social media monitoring “clipping service” for a comprehensive measurement.

The Payoff

It’s a formidable task to have a comprehensive Social Media Marketing Plan.  However, the payoff is potentially enormous and includes:

• Achieving a mass media reach similar to television

• Building a community around your brand

• Engaging your clients/prospects

• Immersing your clients/prospects in your brand

• Fostering communication & networking

• Selling without “selling”

• Developing  a platform for other forms of marketing such as viral marketing (example: viral video)

• Supporting other Internet marketing thrusts, such as link building for search engine optimization campaigns

• Supporting traditional marketing thrusts (i.e. a fully integrated marketing campaign)

I believe Social Media Marketing represents the beginning of a major new movement in business communications.  It embodies the best elements of marketing, advertising, and public relations.  I also believe those companies with the foresight to become early adopters will reap the greatest benefits.

I’m looking forward to developing a social media relationship with you!