Jul
05

Social Media Day- Is it The New World Media Horizon?

social media horizon

Editor’s Note: This is a contributed guest post.

Social Media Day isn’t just some vague recognition of social media. It’s actually something entirely new in human history. The human race has never been in instant contact with itself in real time before, without the limitations of nationalities, language and political boundaries. This was a unique event, where cultures could actually mix. It’s also a new sort of human interaction, “SEO for the soul”, as well as social media marketing, the newest, biggest thing in marketing.

The big day was a pretty good indicator of how strongly social media is influencing the world. Social media sites are making news in their own right now, and the response to Social Media Day was a lot bigger than the simple old broadcast cross links to other countries.

This was only the second annual Social Media Day, and it went off the scale in terms of participation.

The idea of “believing” in media is perhaps a little over the top these days, but in terms of putting social media into practice, there’s no doubt that Social Media Day was a big success. 90 countries across six continents were involved. The general meetups were more than double last year, another sign of expanding horizons in a medium which is still, let’s face it, in its very early infancy.

The truth is that social media is an entirely new medium and nobody’s really too sure what it can do.

It’s evolving in ways nobody would have dreamed possible. Nobody really knows how many people there are active on the social media sites, but it’s somewhere around at least three quarters of a billion people at the very least. That’s the biggest single demographic on Earth for any kind of media, ever. Facebook alone has more people than the entire United States.

There’s another interesting fact becoming obvious. The marketing industry is trying to get into this gigantic electronic super-power’s buying power. This is also the most mobile market on Earth.

The truth is that social media is very unlike any other kind of media, able to react quickly to information and spread the message around the world on its own terms.

Cynics may note that this means that marketing, of all things, is becoming a social media enabler, adding more commercial power to the social media phenomenon. History tends to follow the money wherever it goes. Facebook, for example, is becoming a lot better organized as the Facebook marketing companies figure out that social media is simultaneously the ultimate impulse buying point of sale and the most demanding.

Homo Consumer Sapiens can be a tough customer. Social media users are also real online users, determined to get what they want, looking for real information about their purchases, and trying to get the best deals. Social Media Day showed that there’s a new human reality at work, changing lifestyles with a few clicks. Don’t be surprised if the next Social Media Day or the one after it turns into the biggest media event in history. It’s just a matter of time.

May
12

6 Ways To Improve Your Company’s Social Media Marketing

Using social media marketing can be a very good way to develop true and strong relationships with others online. Using it to develop formal and often very important informal relationships can be very beneficial to your business. Here are some points that you and others in your company should consider so that you stay at the top.

  • Minimize junk. Are you falling into the trap of putting every little detail about your life online? It is important that you keep focused on why you are involved in a certain group or medium. Remember that each of your posts needs to be important. Unless you are Brad Pitt and there is a mountain of followers drooling on your every word, make sure that you and others in your company are relevant.
  • Keep it consistent. As with every element of your company’s operations it is important that you keep standards of communication. Setting rules regarding tone and appropriateness for all of those in your company is of utmost importance. This may take some of the fun out of it, but one mistake could spread and be very damaging for your business. Perhaps you should consider those working for you have both their own personal and professional profiles.
  • Management. Some amount of randomness may be beneficial to creating and keeping interest, but using certain software programs to manage, schedule and assess the effectiveness of your company’s posting will be greatly beneficial to understanding your SEO efforts. Perhaps there are better times and better ways that your team can be collaborating (working together), and only analysis of your efforts will allow you to see this. There are several premium and free-ware options available.
  • Encourage participation. Having the technical means and the content to stir debate amongst your followers and readers is extremely important. Making sure that you have your networks set up correctly so that you have specific areas for participants to engage in, and you can moderate, are of the utmost importance. The two skills of being a good content developer, and intangible asset, and having the technical know-how, are extremely important.
  • Ahead of the curve. Learning from others in your industry can be very beneficial, however, it is those who are ahead of the curve, and dare to do something different, that often reap most of the rewards. You will need to use your imagination and creativity if you are to stand out. Respect the intelligence of your readers and understand that they are already getting used to many of the same tricks to get their attention floating around out there.
  • Keeping it real. This must be one of the all-time important factors of any company’s activities. Remember, people are not stupid, and as soon as they even get a hint that your company is not being real, they will drop you in a flash. Just because you are not communicating face to face, don’t think that they cannot read between the lines. Let them know where you stand from the beginning unless you and your people are extremely experienced in true guerrilla marketing.

It is important to not get overwhelmed with the potential and possibilities of any campaign. Some people believe in an online social Karma. Take on your company’s online activities like any other element of your business, step by step, and seek professional advice, after all it is your financial future.

 

 

Apr
13

Search Engine Optimization vs. Social Media Optimization

Understanding how SEO and SMO work is crucial to establishing an appropriate internet marketing strategy for your business. Think of your business as bowl of plain pasta. Think of your internet marketing strategy options, SEO and SMO, as red sauce and cheese. You know that red sauce and cheese are really good on plain pasta because you’ve seen other people do it and be successful. You’re eager to use both of them to reap the benefits that you know exist, but you aren’t quite sure how much of each to use or how to strike the most fruitful balance.

Like red sauce and cheese, SEO and SMO are separate entities. You can use both independently of each other and still end up with great tasting pasta; at the same time, they can also go really well together. Using them together for the best possible outcome will require you to really know who is going to be eating the pasta (your target audience,) how you want it to taste (your business goals,) as well as knowing your pasta well (what are the ins and outs of the heart of your business.)

Metaphors aside, every business is different in terms of how they should engage in SEO and SMO to best benefit their marketing strategy. The first step to building a successful plan is to understand in what ways they are separate, and in what ways they overlap.

Search Engine Optimization has to do with your website’s visibility on the net in search engine results pages. There are many aspects that contribute to a website’s level of optimization including on-site elements, number and relevance of incoming links, frequency and quality of content, as well as other structural components of the site.

Social Media Optimization refers to the interactive networking that your business engages in online, though social media networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, website blogs, and social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg.

The popularity of social media has grown immensely in recent years, and its relevance to SEO has consequently expanded along the way. King Google now accommodates real time results in searches, so relevant, popular tweets now take priority and are listed at the very top of SERP’s (search engine results pages.) LinkedIn and Twitter profiles are also frequently listed high up on results pages; when websites are rated highly on social bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, they can reach the network homepage, and subsequently their average amount of traffic will skyrocket.

The increase in ranking and traffic that social media engagement can bring is one example of the direct and dramatic effect SMO can have on search engine optimization. This type of fast spike in rankings and traffic can often be short lived, though, if a website is not appropriately optimized and satisfying other SEO requisites.

So what’s the best internet marketing approach for your business– SEO, SMO, or both? The answer to this question is entirely dependent on the intricacies of your individual business; here are a few examples that may help you assess the best strategy for you.

One of our clients at Fresh Tilled Soil, Equipment Genius, is a business that sells engineering equipment online. The business services industry professionals who are knowledgeable about what they want and when they need to have it by. For Equipment Genius, engaging heavily in social media venues like Twitter or StumbleUpon would not be a worthwhile method of marketing. Instead, setting up a site blog that is updated regularly and discusses industry-specific news is a much better approach; this form of social media more appropriately engages their clientele while simultaneously contributing to their online visibility and SEO. Website blogs benefit both SEO and SMO, actively engaging site visitors while increasing the relevance and quality of your site content. Blogs promote a community forum centered around niche topics and industries, and can help you establish and differentiate your brand. They are quite valuable for SEO on a number of levels too, when used to their full potential.

Another of our clients, Seven Fund, has very different needs in terms of SMO for their internet marketing strategy. As a non-profit organization whose mission is to devise enterprising solutions to global poverty, Seven is constantly holding art and essay competitions where they ask the public to participate. Their business is dependent upon active engagement with the public, to use marketing as a means of expanding their business along with public awareness. Social media engagement via networks like Twitter and Flickr holds immense marketing potential for this sort of company. It allows them to reach specific groups interested in their line of work like educators, philanthropists, and charities. SOM also allows them to engage internationally, which is essential to their goal; it helps Seven get in touch with international figures who can help progress social change through their public positioning.

It’s a good idea for all businesses in 2010 to take some basic steps in terms of SEO and SMO to maintain a strong, up to date marketing strategy. Improving your SEO strategy with some on-site improvements, and your SMO by establishing a company presence on major social networks are great first steps. Establishing your brand online and gradually gaining a comfortable understanding of the internet marketing world can only help further your cause. From there, identifying your target audience and company goals is the best way to successfully map out the best online marketing strategy for your business.

alex stetson

This is a guest post by Alex Stetson, Internet Marketing Specialist at Fresh Tilled Soil, a UI web design and internet marketing firm in Waltham, MA.
Follow her on twitter @marisol1986.

Mar
09

A Guide to ‘Getting Seen’ Online using SEO

Kristin Dziadul blue eye

Ever wonder how you as a person could get found online by developing your own personal brand? With a few simple yet critical steps, you can use search engine optimization (and social media optimization) to make your own name and brand much more searchable and well known on the Internet.

Now, SEO is no easy task, but a few simple fixes can go miles to getting found online by virtually anyone.

Read On…

So, if you own your own blog or small site that is primarily for personal usage to spread your ideas, network, get a job, or help others, and you want to be more visible online, here are some quick tips to start doing today.

First, plan what key points you are going to write about so that you can ensure your keywords for the topic can be incorporated into the title, meta tags, and the body of the text. The All in One SEO Pack for WordPress (which I use) makes labeling these quite easy. Include these keywords in the blog’s URL and in any images that you use. When search engines crawl your site, they read the words in the URL, and the keywords can pop out easier if they are labeled in the image. These are small, but ever so important details to pay attention to!

Second, reach out to others about your blog, whether it is via social sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace, etc.) to promote it, start discussions around the topic, and even be found for a guest blogging opportunity. Guest blogs can get you inbound links back to your site if you are willing to write for other people’s sites. If they are unwilling to pay you for your guest blog, at least ask for a backlink so you get some credit for your site. The more credible the hosting site, the better ranking your site will get in SEO.

Third, great content on your site naturally attracts more traffic. If you have valuable and unique information, ideas, images, etc., people will be intrigued and want to come back for more. To keep them loyal to your site, ensure that all your posts are consistent in writing quality and content provided so they will stay interested. By providing readers with something different than any other competing blog, you can become higher ranked for certain keywords and credibility in SEO.

Fourth, reference back to your Google Analytics reports to see what posts have had success in regards to search traffic, and which ones can be improved. You can utilize Google’s keyword search tool to help you develop the most accurate keywords for each blog post. Even if your blog is ranked #1 for a particular keyword, it can be further enhanced to become even more popular. Digging back into older blog posts based on success or failure on analytics can help improve your site’s overall SEO. If you have hundreds of blog posts, don’t bother going back through all of them, just the ones that seem to need it based on Google’s Analytics report.

Fifth, analyzing your site’s competition can help leverage your site. Find out what sites rank higher than yours, what keywords their posts rank highest for, and what inbound links they have. There are several sites out there today, Market Samurai in particular, which can give you this in-depth analysis. You can also just search for that site on Google or scan the site to see what they do or don’t do, and improve your site.

By seeking out where their links are coming from, you can make opportunities for yourself to get links from there. For example, if a competing blog was featured on an industry leader’s site as a guest blog, then reach out to that industry leader (either via their site’s contact form, social media, email, etc.) and offer to write a free guest blog for them.

There are several other factors that determine your page rank and SEO effectiveness that I must note:

1. Domain age: The longer the domain is registered to exist, the better Google will rank it since they know you will be around for awhile and are not just a short-term site that may be less important. When you purchase your site, it is best to purchase at least a few years worth (and you can get discounts by doing this as well in most cases).

2. Page rank: See your rank (visit seomoz.com‘s tools to help with this). You can also compare page ranks of competitor sites to yours.

3. Index count: Number of pages indexed on your site.

4. Backlinks pointing to your site: This can give your site more credibility in the eyes of a search engine if that hosting site is very credible on the Internet.

5. Yahoo Directory: Make sure your site is listed in this directory to be registered as a site; this makes it more searchable.

6. Title: Put keywords in your title, as I mentioned earlier.

7. URL: Put keywords in the URL! You can easily edit the URL of each blog post, and ensure that you space out each word so search engines can read the keywords. Ex. instead of kdmedianow.com/gettingseenonline, use kdmedianow.com/getting-seen-online.

8. Description & Header: Include keywords in the meta description tag and header tag too.

    Ultimately, if you want to be ranked for a particular keyword, you need to use it in all key spots on your site (title, heading, URL)

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9. Cache Age: the number of days since Google cached your pages.

10. Internal Links: link your blog posts to each other by referencing back to older ones in newer ones. This doesn’t count as much as external links to your blog, but it does help.

Takeaway…

Although all of the above tips are critical, don’t let them take away your focus from generating great quality content. The content is ultimately why your previous and current visitors read your blog posts from the start, so continue to generate incredible and unique information. All else will follow, and SEO helps that content be found much easier.

As an independent blogger and site owner myself, I have found all of these tips to work tremendously well. For instance, I spent an entire day enhancing the keywords on each of my blog posts by researching relevant terms related to my posts and including them in all the critical places, and within a week I doubled my site visits and increased the comments on my posts by at least two-fold!

This process is time consuming, but if you know your content is great and you want to ‘get seen’, it is more than worth it to take a few days to enhance these SEO tricks and tips.

Further Reading…

A great resource for a further explanation of the in’s and out’s of SEO is seomoz.com. Also, you can see the grade at which your website ranks right now, and ways to improve it significantly, by using Hubspot’s free Website Grader tool. As you can see to the right, I have utilized this tool and am working every week to improve it.

Problogger.net also gives great tips on creating a great blog and optimizing it.

If you have other tips and tricks to enhance the SEO for a personal site, please list them below, I’d love to hear your feedback!

Good Luck!

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