Search Engine Strategies – Social Media Best Practices

Social Media
February 15, 2010

Rand Fishkin from SEOMOZ.org is starting to talk about Social Media Best Pratices.

“Put some Whiskey in your Oatmeal”

“Concept that Social Media is eroding the blogosphere.” 3 or 5 years ago the 18-25 age group were blogging however, not the same age group are looking towards Facebook and Twitter. These are truer social networks because you can engage with your followers and you have a mixture of online friends and real-life friends.

You dont have to wait for the search engines to find your blog, you had to self-promote and spend time telling people (whether that be by emailing your contact list or shouting to your friends). Twitter and Facebook push the content (updates, links, photos) to your friends.

“5% of your life is spent on Facebook” – Is that a scary metric or what!

Twitter’s growth has slowed down, the massive interest has stopped and new accounts have levelled off.

“Around 35% of Twitter followers have fewer than 5 followers. “

Ok the projector is getting swapped………..

2007 was the last time the size of the blogosphere was measured. There were over 70,000,000 blogs at the time. Why did they stop? We’re now looking at sizing models and the figure has now been adjusted to 30,000,000 blogs? What is classified as a blog in this Technorati study? 30,000,000 seems such a low number.

However, the number that I’m interested in is the frequency of blogs. I don’t want to read a blog where the last time it was updated was years ago. I want to read information from people in the know, where the blog is updated daily or weekly – and to follow the theme of today ‘I really don’t care what you had for breakfast’ but, may be interested where you are going for conferences and whether you’ve written a white paper recently! Happy to engage with you on a personal level but, don’t take the piss.

Social Media vs. Viral

Social is not necessarily viral! Interesting concept. Social is about branding it allows you to spread a message and allows others to spread the same message. In the early stages its a one to many (or thousands) message and then its those thousands spreading your message for you.

Question: There is so much buzz about how marketeers are using social media for marketing purposes.

Social is about capturing people who want to be a fan of your brand. Ok I’m not really sure that Rand answered the question (maybe I missed something) but, social media to me provides me as a business to communicate directly with the brand and also understand what people are saying about me. If the buzz is about selling via social media then lets understand the contribution to a multi-channel marketing campaign approach!

"Top priority for senior marketeers is social networks and applications

- 2010 - Digital Marketing Outlook"

Social Media is such a minefield – do the wrong things and you can cause untold damage to your brand, products and the BOTTOM LINE. Senior marketeers beware! Rand recommended this article on ZDNET.

Nine Worst Social Media Fails of 2009 – ZDNET

Construct a Strategy:

1. What are the business goals

2. What do we want social media to do for our business?

3. What will we attempt ot reach these goals?

4. What metrics will we sued to measure our success?

5. What will be consider to be an acceptable ROI?

Why don’t you look up in the dictionary and find out the definition of ’strategy’. Posting photos of your company party and saying you’re marketing via Facebook. Sorry but crap! You’re flirting with a marketing channel whose users are far more intelligent and can see through things like that.

Get a ’social champion’ who understands the channels. These are likely to be those 18-25 people who use this on a regular basis. What man / woman wouldn’t want a job where they get paid to use Facebook and Twitter. However, this job will only last as long as their is a provable ROI. As soon as the next marketing channel comes along (Second Life Version 2?) you’ll have to promote or fire this individual and get someone in the right age group to build this channel up! Older age groups have an understand of traditional marketing methods and in most situations this doesn’t work for social media.

Last Touch Attribution Blog Post

If you’re looking at where you get your traffic from understand the total journey. People may purchase on the fourth or fifth visit (or engagement with your brand). Maybe you sell shoes and you see a Facebook group and click through to your site, then his/her friend sends a Facebook update or a Tweet talking about the comfort of said shoes and then you visit the site again but, via a sponsored keyword and do further research on colour, materials and so on. Then on the sixth – buy!

Where do you attribute the sale? Social Media and Pay-Per-Click programmes both has an impact in the purchasing decision (as did recommendations) so what was the deciding influence? Well in short you can’t tell but, what you can do is attribute a weighted average (perhaps heavily weighted towards the final conversion touch point).

Direct Twitter Attributed Sales

Dell reported that over $3m sales from their three Twitter accounts – developing the channel must have cost nothing but for $3 million benefit (1.6 million followers). What else could we sell this way?

Social Bookmarking / Linkedin Groups

Getting your pages listed on Delicious and social news sites sends great traffic. However, what is the attribution of sales. Rand’s example was last touch attribution. So unless you understand the journey then how can you understand true social media success.

Question: How often can you retweet about the same thing?

Rand recommends this slidedeck from Dan Zarellla.

Thanks for a great presentation – hope I got down some useful information for my blog readers.