Social Media 101: The Search and Social Landscape for Small Businesses, by Rob Garner

Social Media Landscape for Small Businesses

May 25, 2011

Opportunity for engagement growing rapidly

Shift in search parallels growth of social media

Social PPC has emerged as a major PPC engine placement (March 2011)

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Popular Objectives for Social Media Marketing

• Increased brand awareness and enhanced reputation is the most important objective for social media marketing, with just over half of company and agency respondents (both 51%) deeming it to be the top goal.

• Improved customer service and satisfaction is a more significant objective for social media marketing than for SEO and PPC, with 34% of companies and 38% of agencies [Figure 20 and 21] saying that it’s among the top two goals for this type of marketing. There has been a significant increase in the proportion of companies saying that social media activity is primarily aimed at improving customer service and satisfaction, from 8% in 2010 to 13% this year.

Source: State of Search Marketing Report 2011

Popular Objectives for Search Engine Optimization

• Driving web site traffic has become the most commonly cited primary objective for SEO, with 42% of company respondents saying that this is their top priority. Generating leads is now the main goal for just under a third of company respondents (29%), while selling product, services or content directly online is the most important objective for less than a fifth of companies (18%).

• As organizations come to the realization that success in selling and generating leads has more to do with on-site conversion rate optimization than SEO, a lower proportion of companies view sales and lead generation as primary SEO objectives.


Still search and social are widely treated as separate disciplines

• While the proportion of companies who don’t carry out any social media marketing activity has declined from 18% in 2010 to 13% this year, 9% more respondents are treating social media and search engine marketing separately.

• Search and social CANNOT be run as separate programs. Integration is key to success!


Awareness is a major expected outcome of social media for small businesses

8Copyright iCrossing - Proprietary and Confidential

Common metrics and objectives measured in social media channels


Social media marketing is being adopted by the vast majority of marketers in Europe and NA


89% of marketers are currently active, or plan to be active in the next 12 months

An umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate

technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos

and audio.

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA?

Source: Wikipedia.org

In other words………… Social Media is about people having conversations Online

The conversations are powered by……..

•Blogs•Microblogs •Online Chat•RSS•Widgets•Social Networks •Social Bookmarks•Message Boards•Podcasts•Video Sharing Sites•Photo Sharing Sites•Virtual Worlds•Wikis

WHY DOES THIS MATTER TO OUR BUSINESS?

Because you are either part of the conversation, or you are not.

Paid media placements in social spaces that are often “derivatives” of typical online media placements

Sharing of relevant digital content through various website channels, including distributing to content communities

Starting an ongoing dialogue with consumers by reaching out in their communities and sharing content that is useful, relevant, and portable

Integrating social elements into your website, creating a web experience that meets consumer expectations for sharing content and interacting with other users

Initiatives that seek to build customer dialogue and engagement over time through active community participation and management

Supporting short-term campaigns or promotions and driving traffic, in conjunction with traditional offline and online media buys

Social media engagement strategy categorization

Content Distribution

Active Outreach

On-site Integration

Community Building

Social Advertising

Description

Increasing exposure for brand or product through continuous distribution of content or “assets” to communities

Building short-term or long-term relationships with key influencers online through direct conversations

Establishing your long-term web presence and allowing visitors to share experience with others (this is increasingly a best practice for website development roadmaps)

Creating long-term active relationships with loyal customer base; establishing a “social CRM” or online “focus group” with an embedded value exchange for users

Best Suited For

Off-site video channel or photo feed

Blogvertising, forum ads, widget sponsorship, blog sponsorship, SNS ads

Blogger outreach, 1:1 forum discussions, user-generated content contest

Social media engagement strategy categorization continued

Examples

User reviews, sharing functionality, social networking API integration (e.g., Facebook Connect); corporate blog

Branded/private social network, SNS (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn); on-site member forums

Sample Technologies


Active Outreach

On-site Integration

Community Building

Social Advertising

• Indirect gains in long-term link acquisition through new site traffic

• Some types of widgets allow for SEO-friendly link placements

• YouTube (Google) and Flickr (Yahoo!) pages often appear in normal search results

• Profiles and syndication on content sites often allow links back to your site

• Powerful bloggers can link back to your site and influence their readers to do so also

• Contests can attract high numbers of links in a short amount of time

• Adds high volume of unique, changing content to your site for engines to index

• Strengthens authority of your site in the engines’ eyes, helping all pages on the site

• Similar to active outreach, pushing content out allows people to link back from their sites

• Profiles on social sites often allow links back to your site

• None, really. At worst, there would be no SEO benefit to your advertising efforts.

SEO impacts of social media engagement


Active Outreach

On-site Integration

Community Building

Social Advertising

Potential SEO Benefits

• Decide what balance to strike between open user dialogue and controlled comments. Negative items that become popular can infiltrate search results for desired keywords.

• None, really. At worst, bloggers might not be interested in your content or in talking about your contest.

• Decide what balance to strike between open user dialogue and controlled comments. Negative items that become popular can infiltrate search results for desired keywords.

• None, really. At worst, your communities might be sparsely visited.

Potential SEO Pitfalls

Some things to consider before “going social”

1. Be AUTHENTIC

2. Be OPEN

3. Be RESPONSIVE

4. Be ACTIVE

And ALWAYS provide an Incentive of Value

• Mentions/Blog Mentions: Instances where brand, product or service is written about or tagged, in blogs, forums, social networks and traditional news/sites. As we conduct outreach, see how this mention number increases, thus increasing overall awareness

• Mentions on High Authority Blogs: Using Technorati Authority rank, traffic data, and network size (number of blogs linking to that blog), “high authority” blogs are identified. Generally a High Authority blog has at minimum a Technorati Authority of 150.

• Cumulative Reach of Mentions: Analyze cumulative network effects of these social mentions by examining blog traffic data, audience size in social networks and number of inbound blog links to mentions – thus providing insight into to the overall reach and impact of mentions.

• Inbound blog links: Measure and track total number of inbound blog links to a specific site or asset, as inbound blog links correlate to both advocacy and visibility in addition to awareness and reach

Track and measure the performance of outreach campaigns using “conversation” metrics that correlate with awareness and advocacy. Some of these KPIs may include:

Blogger Outreach - Measurement

Measurement: Blog network size

Before outreach After outreach

• NetworkSense Map: # nodes indicates instances of a keyword or URL; the larger the node the more inbound links it has• The larger the network, the more mentions, inbound links and traffic point to each node

What is Community Management?

Community Management is real-time, active participation within social spaces that goes beyond just sharing content:

• Ongoing listening

• Establishing search-sensitive social nomenclature and set of behaviors

• Pro-actively sharing content based on listening and SEO value

• Making friends, supporting and giving visibility to your Fans and Followers

• Amplifying content

• Building and maintaining relationships with key influencers


Amplifying content, increasing interaction

• Drive meta-content, or “search signals” around key assets• Ask questions, solicit comments• Promote the use of “Likes”• Conduct re-tweet campaigns and contests

• Share content and links with 3rd party blogs & influencers

• Cross-post to multiple social spaces (digg, Facebook, Twitter)

• Respond to comments, foster dialogue around each piece of content and following up with additional content and links when relevant

Social’s Impact on Search and SEO

Shift in Linking Measurement: Social impact on SEO

• Links are the cornerstones of natural search algorithms

• But influence of links has shifted greatly from webmasters and technical influencers, to the average Internet user

• As a result, the social graph has taken a massive bite out of the link graph

• Examples of this include:• Tweeting (not a direct link)• Publishing via blog CMS such as

WordPress or Blogger• Rating, commenting, posting• Bookmarking• Etc.


Social relevancy:

It’s just common-sense SEO

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Social Relevancy: How engines are looking at Twitter

Consider the parallel aspects of websites, and Twitter accounts

• Domain authority : username authority

• Duplicate content : retweets

• Blogging freshness : content freshness : microblogging freshness

• Links : number of followers

• Quality of links : Quality of followers

• Inbound links vs. outbound links : ratio of followers in contrast to the number of people followed

• Linking to bad : good neighborhoods

• Themes of Twitter users

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Social Relevancy: How engines are looking at people and companies as nodes

Social signals on search: “insurance”


Top pages, as disseminated in social networks

Top social influencers on socially disseminated content

Digital Asset Optimization

Various digital asset types media types can be optimized to extend opportunities in both search and social networks. Asset types include:

• Video• News • Blogs• Images• Maps• Etc.

UGC: Reciprocating relationship of search traffic to community, and vice versa

RSS Feeds

• Considered a direct signal into Google, both via Feedburner and standard feeds

• Signal for fresh content in search

• Primary signal for the rapid active sharing of content across social networks

• Should be deployed for various asset types, and in any place where content is updated on a regular basis


Engagement

Engage one bird and you might attract the whole flock

• Engaging users in search via content translates to spreading of content

• Engaging users in networks allows content to spread like wildfire, which picks up positive search effects along the way


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Thank You.

Social Media 101: The Search and Social Landscape for Small Businesses, by Rob Garner

Technology

words social media

social media activity

social media landscape

social ppc

social crm

social interaction

search engine marketing

content communities