Social Media Marketing: What Is It Good For
…definitely NOT absolutely nothing. Uh. Huh.
Bennina Delobelle From Monster is first up.
Her primary role is to set p Social Media & USG products for the site. She makes sure that users can come from many places and have ability to generate content and make the site theirs.
What are Social Media?
- Social Networks – i.e. – Myspace, Linked In (Local & National), Facebook
- Forums – i.e. PHORUM, phpBB
- Microblogging – i.e. – Twitter, Pownce
- MultiMedia sharing Tools – i.e. – Fliker, YouTube,
- Diggs – i.e. – Digg, Wikio
- Blogs & Livecasts – i.e. – Y!Live, Justin
- Virtual Universes – i.e.- 2nd Life, and other online games
The thing that is interesting is that users are in there and it belongs to THEM. That’s were they go daily for their interests. Communities are built here.
It’s a platform to have ALL their attention where you may not have it otherwise online.
The Use of Social Media?
- Connect With The People – Be where the people are! You may have a website but people may not come because its not where they interact so you have to go and get them where they are. This is how you do that.
- Keep Brand Positioning – Its always away to brand yourself.
- Generate More Traffic – They do show in search!
- Enlarge The Targeted Segment – People go to social media in a diff way. The audiences are very different in each type of media. Go to the right people at the right time.
- Increase The User Experience – Social media tells us what people are looking for today! This is getting into their head. They are born with internet. This is it their blood. Its what they use to interact with people. If you’re not there, your losing it.
Requirements For Social Marketing:
- Global means Local – Just because you are on Twitter, doesn’t mean everyone will talk to you. You need to be close to your community just like in real life. You may have friends in other countries but stick within your community. You better speak French if you are in a French community. Wi?
- Resources – Community managers need to get more focus.
- Consistency – The effort should start AND LAST. Don’t et up your profile, get friends and run away!
- Content – Content should get more focus. People are looking for something interesting for you to share with them. Spend extra time here sas so not to waste your own and consumers time@
- Golden Triangles are dominated by social media. Why? Social media has content updated often and there are lots of links to other websites. SEs love freshness and inbound links.
- Create User Centric Products – People share, comment, communicate, & rank…the product belongs to the users.
Good info. Good basics. I want to know EXAMPLES though. I wan to be inspired! I want to think…ooooh, how creative. I did get a couple forums I want to check out and such. Hopefully the next gentleman doesn’t say the same thing.
Next up…
Qualman with EF. He opens with these questions….
“How many use del.icio.us?” – A few hands went up.
“How many of you Twitter?” – More hands go up.
“How many of you use YouPorn?”
What he did…
His company noticed all the apps coming out in social networks for users. Theirs was tell everyone where you’ve traveled in your life. “Global Footprint.” In order to use it though, we were making users give us their data. Then we got an email that said you shouldn’t require us to give our info. They didn’t listen. They HE started his own app “Where I’ve Been” and HIS took off ;(
Then Trip Advisor came along with “Cities I’ve Been to” You don’t have to have a new idea to be successful.
Then they decided to make their own community. Heck, they had lots of students who would want to talk about trip and such. They built it and no one came.
For most companies you don’t need your own social network, for some you do. There are opportunities to build your own community some time. An example is LiveMocha.com
Like other microblogging tools, its mostly just bragging or venting. LOL. Angie bummed a what from who? That’s what that 1 am post was about. LOL.
Where Should I Start? – Where do you think you have the most chance for success. BETA test. Do not start more than one.
When Should I Start? – TODAY. Don’t wait for the perfect thing/time. Don’t push marketing. Find out what people like then push marketing to get people there.
Can search engines crawl social networks? – People say no must the rankings prove otherwise. You can see them at top of results.
Does Facebook PPC work? – It depends. Test. There are a bunch of filters for demo. Its better without them. Don’t treat it like direct response. Don’t send to your site to have them do something. Optimize your landing page.
What’s best way to use twitter for company?– Put in your company name so you can keep an eye on it. Use transparency.
What else is exciting? – SEARCH! SEs aren’t really delivering needs of the user. If you want to buy a car and you use a SE to find it. You’ll get listings. You can do research. Going to take HOURS. It eliminates individual replication of the same task.
Next on the panel was Brent Csutoras talking about how you can use social media as part of your search marketing campaign.
We talk about all sort of things but utilize social marketing as a way to increase you visibility, rankings and links to your site by pushing your service through the social network.
Traditional SEO has us look at domain information about how old it is and what it’s authority looks like. We optimize meta data, internal linking and all that jazz!
Most important is try and get links! They are getting harder and harder to get them. This is where social media can help! The more content you create, the more opportunity you have to put that in front of people and get traffic.
Branding, traffic and all that jazz come from LINKS.
He focuses his social media campaigns on link building campaigns. Woo hoo!
How To encourage Links Back Through Social Media:
- Create Content
- Take it and find communities you can work well within and ones that will respond well to your topic.
- Submit your content into that community
- Then go out and engage the people within the communities. The systems work based on a voting concepts. Then there’s a “popular” page that this content goes on after a “vote.”
- People will use you and link to you once they FIND you.
Community links for Facebook & Reddit, etc. will improve your rankings in the SERPs especially for keywords or buzz words that are part of the social network buzz. It doesn’t necessarily last long but it’s a couple day window where you get a boost for a couple days! These are natural links!
Social Marketing Tips:
- Have a site that’s is social media friendly
- Pick communities you relate to – Don’t do dogs in political community
- Check what worked before – take key phrases and add “most” “top” etc. and search away!
- Crete high quality content- content must be link worthy. Take time to create a campaign that works!
- Understand how to submit and push social campaigns
- Understand what to do with the success
Q & A
How do you deal with time management aspect of social marketing? For those who do SEO, how do you segment your time to fit social marketing into that?
Hard answer. What’s important to you. Its not going to be one of you 10 things you do a day I that’s all you have stick more to bookmarking. Spend more time creating than pushing if its good enough it will spread itself. People can smell your BS. No one wants to be sold something. If you don’t have much time, pick 1 community.
What are the biggest challenges facing integration of social marketing into company marketing campaigns?
Current challenge, proving its value. Big thing is tracking all this hard work.
As it relates to SEO, we noticed you launched a humorous piece of content that had little or no relation to your campaign. Is this the way to go from an SEO point of view? If its not in relation to your company, its not in relation to your keywords. How can a link help?
Even if there is no relation to your site, its still creating authority. A PR 8 site is a PR 8 site. It will help. You can get creative with use of alt tags for your images as well as created redirecting and such. Hmmmmm…..
