Ideas for Business

Photo Credit: ISD 191 Performing Arts Programs

Most of the people that I know who are really making an impact for companies in the social media space see themselves as marketers, vs. singling themselves out as specific to social media. Obviously the demand for social media specific expertise is high, so one must self-identify with that area of focus.

But when it comes down to providing social media consulting, it’s part of an overall online marketing strategy that involves social media, SEO, email, display, PPC etc as appropriate to reach business goals, not just “social media”. Granted, there are changes in social consumer behavior and technology that must be accounted for, but an adaptive online marketing strategy accounts for those changes anyway. Focusing solely on social media or as an independent activity is a disadvantage.

Like many bloggers that have started to experience increased influence, credibility and authority, so too have consultants that work with social media applications and communities. Jason Falls pointed out in his BWE NY presentation that while this newfound importance seems significant to the individual, it’s nowhere near what most brands find useful.

There has been a bit of “big fish, small pond” syndrome going on with a lot of the consultants and agencies that self-identify as experts or gurus in the social space, when really, they’re more like super users vs. social strategists. Not only is effective social media marketing strategic, it’s also a team effort.

Being a “super user” of social applications is a very valuable skill and essential for many roles like Community and Social Media Marketing Manager.  However, social media application super user skills are most valuable when directed by an approach of aligning target audience needs with business goals – i.e. a sound marketing strategy.  They’re mistakenly useful when used to create uncoordinated Blog, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Bookmarking and other social destinations.

For example

Brand: We need a Facebook Fan Page, our competition has 1,500 fans already.  Let’s hire a social media expert.

Social Media Expert: Let’s set up a landing page for people who haven’t “liked” you yet, add “like” “share” and “send” widgets to your website and start a few contests and promotions to attract fans. Schedule useful posts at ideal times of the day and run Facebook ads to drive traffic to your page. We can also run a few promotions to your prospect or client email list to attract fans.  You’ll be at 1,501 fans in no time!

What’s wrong with this example? As a tactic, not much. But when you extend this process between a brand and internal or external social media experts, each setting up social applications for the company and focusing on superficial KPIs like Fans, Friends and Followers without coordination between them, lack of ROI or competitive business value is inevitable.

Many social media experts (but certainly not all) will respond to the brand’s request and make them exactly what they asked for – without seeking to understand where the tactic fits within the overall strategy or what business outcomes should occur as a result. Why? The social media consultant doesn’t want to lose the consulting project, they don’t know how or don’t have the backbone to push back and take a position to educate the brand about a more strategic approach.

Another example:

Brand: We need a Facebook Fan Page, our competition has 1,500 fans already.  Let’s hire a social media expert.

Social Media Expert: Why?

From there, the brand and the social media expert can have a discussion to understand  what the brand is really after. Is it really 1,500 fans or is it being useful and creating more value for a quantity of qualified Facebook community members?

What happens at 1,500? What about 15,000? What business goal will be affected? Is Facebook the best way to achieve that goal? Can Facebook work more efficiently and effectively in concert with other social promotions to achieve said goals? Who will be involved internally? How will you measure? What are the benchmarks and milestones? Who will sponsor? What are the short term and long term wins? There are many questions to answer and if your social media consultant is weak, they’ll pooh pooh the need to think about the bigger picture in favor of “crack-like” spikes in FFF counts.

What I’m getting at with this post is simply: Companies that want to explore and succeed in social business can approach it as a series of disconnected experimental tactics and evolve through social media expert “super user” expertise. Or they can approach their social media marketing efforts as a component within the overall marketing strategy with coordinated and connected efforts that are designed to directly achieve and/or influence business goals both in the short and long term.

From the brand point of view, this can feel like more than what marketing departments can get approved, so they go after tactics instead – hoping some measure of success can justify increased budget and program growth.

From a consultant point of view, going through a few siloed tactical implementations are necessary to gain the brand’s trust in your social media marketing expertise so you can grow the program into something more strategic.

Can we have our cake and eat it too? Can wise social media marketers provide both tactical execution advice to build a business case at the same time as strategic marketing and change agent services to determine where social fits within overall marketing strategy?

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There has been a lot of speculation as to whether or not Twitter is good for SEO. I think there is one thing that is evidence that Twitter is, indeed, good for SEO (but that’s not the only benefit). Both major search engines – Google and Bing – include Twitter in their search results. Google has gone so far as to include a realtime search channel in its search menu.

So how can Twitter help you improve your SEO?

There are several indicators of relevance and quality attached to Twitter as an SEO tool. Here are a few based on my own observations:

• Be aware of your text – Just like anchor text, the search engines likely use the text within your tweets to determine what a link is about. However, if you use short URLs, you shouldn’t expect them to pass link juice.
• Tweet authority – Both search engines look at page authority when determining the value of a link with organic SEO. They likely use a similar approach to determine link value from a Twitter account. If a tweet’s author has a high authority, it will be a high value link.
• Link in your profile – The link in your profile likely passes link juice.
• Link diversity – If you keep tweeting to the same domain over and over again, the search engines will consider that a spam account and likely discount all your links.
• Your overall social authority – Your social graph overall is very important. This includes your reputation across all social media. While it is difficult to tell exactly how this reputation is scored, if you have a positive reputation across all social media, that will look better to the search engines and your links overall will carry more authority.

These are just guesses. There is no guaranteed way to tell if your Twitter links are improving your SEO without placing specific measurements in place. And the search engines have said that Twitter links are no follow, however, Google has been known to ignore the no follow rule when it deems it should. You should always assume your links will pass some value and work on making all of your online marketing efforts more SEO-friendly.

All Facebook shares these tips for effective marketing and public relations through Facebook:

• Post your best content on Thursday because that is the day it is most likely to get read.
• Release major news releases early in the morning; otherwise, you will get shuffled to the bottom of the news feeds.
• Full links are 300% more likely to get read than short URLs (which is the total opposite of Twitter, by the way).
• When adding buttons to your website, use both the Like and the Send button.
• If you want to be included in the top news of your friends’ feeds, focus on gaining higher “Edge Rank,” the algorithm that is based on certain key words like “today” and “limited time only.”
• Since Facebook is one of the leading sites for driving traffic to 21 of the top news agency websites, make good use of it in your social media marketing.
• Words like “best” and “most” are most shareable on Facebook.
• If you want your video to go viral, Facebook is the best platform to use.

I can’t vouch personally for all of these tips, but a few of them I can. The full link, for instance, is a must when sharing on Facebook. Also, posting your news release first thing in the morning means being top priority for the day.

Have fun, and be effective, when posting on Facebook.

At one time, it seemed that no one could topple Yahoo! from the top of its mountain as king of online display advertising. It seemed that nobody really wanted to. Until now. And that somebody is, of all entities, Google.

Last year, Google owned 13.3% of the display ad market online. Yahoo! had 13.6%. This year, the numbers are 14.7% and 12.3% for the first quarter, respectively.

But don’t take from this that Google is taking Yahoo!s advertisers away. They aren’t. Yahoo!s target market are big corporations who advertise on television. Google’s target market are PPC advertisers who are now trying online display advertising. Completely different markets.

While all of that is interesting to note, there are two other bits of interesting data the AdAge article shares. First, online display advertising is growing overall. More companies are interested in the display advertising channel (this one is interesting because online display ads have been on the decline in recent years). And the second bit of information is that Facebook is in a very close third place in the online display ad race.

All of this is really good news for advertisers. The competition means that you have choices, and it also spells lower advertising rates as the companies compete for your dollars.

If online display advertising is something you’ve been considering for your business, now might be the time to get in.

If you are new to Internet marketing or website development, or you just simply have stuck to the basics, then you might wonder what a heat map is and how it can help you improve your website and lead to greater revenues. Even increase your ROI.

A heat map, in simple terms, is a graphic picture of your website traffic and what that traffic does on each page of your website.

Represented by colors, a heat map can show you the “hot spots” on each page of your website. It can show you where the most mouse movements occur, which indicates where users’ eyeballs travel, and even which links are clicked on the most. You can then use that information to improve your websites SEO and overall content mix.

Let’s say you discover that on almost all of your pages, the most viewed area of the page is the top right corner. Let’s say that, furthermore, the most clicked link on each page is the banner ad in the top right corner that offers site visitors a free download of your e-book. What does that tell you?

It should tell you that whatever information you provide in that e-book is deemed valuable to your site visitors. It could be a good opportunity to provide more in-depth information about that content. Perhaps it’s time to publish and market a more in-depth e-book on the topic that you can sell to your site visitors and e-mail list.

What if, on the other hand, the most viewed part of your website was the top left corner and the most clicked link on your home page was a link at the bottom of the page that led visitors to your About Us page. What’s that tell you?

If you have links in the top left corner of your home page that are not getting clicked on as much as the links at the bottom of the page, then you probably have something wrong with those links or the content that surrounds them. Maybe you should reword your anchor text. Or maybe the content surrounding the link should do a better job of leading your visitors to take the desired action. Maybe the call to action itself isn’t working.

Heat maps are valuable tools that measure many factors at once. If you are serious about making your website stand out, then you should be using heat maps.