Posts Tagged ‘SMM’

Dont Panic! Social Media Optimisation

Social media marketing is often considered as an addition to an SEO plan. Participating or featuring on social media sites can enhance your site’s reputation across the net, get you some inbound links, help you to develop a community around your site and even boost the rankings of your pages. For this reason, many SEO consultants will consider adding social media marketing to a client’s off-page SEO.

You might feel a little overwhelmed at the thought of having to start out on a completely new campaign. In fact, many businesses are put off by the extra work social media marketing involves. The benefits of participating in social media usually far outweigh the work put in, but it can be hard to see this when you’re first considering the social media.

Social media sites operate quite differently to search engines in many, many ways, and it pays to know the rules before you begin. While there are a lot of differences between optimising for the search engines and optimising for social media sites, but there are a lot of similarities as well.

• Searches will return ranked results. The way users access content on social media sites isn’t that much different from access on search engines. With search engines, results pages are assembled in response to a user query. On social media sites, news feeds are assembled on the presumption that the user query is about recent news, and search results are assembled in the familiar response to the user’s keyword

• Internet users behave in predictable ways. The factors involved in assembling lists of results on social media sites are slightly different, but they are predictable, and things like keywords still play a major part. The results also have a particular audience, who behave in predictable ways. SEO experts take advantage of your existing user knowledge to optimise for your user groups on social media sites

• Content drives rankings. Although many things are taken into consideration in determining where results appear on the various lists on social media sites, content still plays a major part. Your social media content can be treated with optimisation techniques, just as your site’s content will be

• Algorithms are open to reverse engineering. Just as has happened with Google over time, elements of the search algorithms of social media sites have unfolded over time. Although search engine optimisation companies will never pin down exactly what goes into search algorithms, a study of search results can reveal a lot. Early social media marketing was based on experiment, but is less so as SEO companies discover more about how social media search works

• Search results are a changing landscape. Just as the search engines alter their algorithms to keep ahead of the manipulations of SEO experts, social media sites alter their own methods of ranking results to stay ahead of the game.

This means that it can pay to seek professional advice for all types of optimisation. You can discuss this with us at SEO Consult.

Tags: seo, SMM, SMO, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimisation
Posted in Social Media Optimisation on February 8th, 2010 by James | No Comments »

Top 25 Social Media Tips

It’s only been less than a decade, but Social Media has changed the way we do marketing. In our fast-paced industry ideas are thought of, tried out, and either vetted or discarded, all within a matter of days. With all the flurry that’s happening, it sometimes gets a little bit hard to actually figure out what works, and what fails. Here are the top 25 tips you should definitely learn should you decide to venture with social media.

Be objective. Start a campaign by asking yourself questions like: how do I measure success? Upon meeting the metrics, does the campaign stop or would it have further goals? Setting your goals beforehand avoids unnecessary guessing later on when you’re faced with two opposing decisions.
Be on your best behaviour. Everything you do gets recorded – sometimes permanently.
Strive to be interesting. You want people to come back to your profile over and over.
Maintain a lively discussion. Reply if people comment on your profile.
Don’t make it difficult for people to give you feedback. Appreciate their feedback, be it positive or constructive.
Interact with your fans. A contest or two every once in a while wouldn’t hurt. You can also try a few surveys.
Keep your profile current.
Choose a good username. Seriously.
Use services that will integrate all your social media applications together. For example, FaceBook can link with Twitter so that any status update on FaceBook reflects as a tweet.
Customize your landing pages. You don’t have to go with the drab default layouts. Many social media sites allow you to upload your own designs and layouts – take advantage of them.
Watch out for new entrants. You’ll never know what will be the next twitter or FaceBook.
Join many social media sites, but focus only on a few. Just like many things, it’s preferable to go for quality over quantity.
Organize your information. Company pictures, logos, portfolios, etc. should be in their proper places. You don’t want prospective clients getting lost in the employee pictures.
Don’t forget other Media.
Don’t forget to do website and search engine optimization.
Don’t overdo placing too many widgets and applications. You want them looking at your profile, not tickling yet another cute hamster.
Think about advertising with the social media site’s ad network.
Check – and recheck – your privacy settings.
Have a lot of patience. Your profile needs to build enough critical mass before it becomes profitable to maintain it.
Expand your network. Connect with peers and industry authorities.
Link to your social media site from your main company site, and vice versa.
You mean you don’t have a company site? Get one; social media sites are not a replacement for your main company site.
Make your social media site special by announcing exclusive deals and coupons only available there.
Profile your followers. See what your audience really consists of versus your expected target.
And lastly, remember the golden rule: do unto others what you want them done unto you. That means, don’t get all squeamish about following people – they need followers too just like you need them.