Category: Social Networking

When consumers today search online for the products and services your business offers, you are not only competing with other web sites, you’re also competing with social networking profiles, online videos, blog posts, Twitter tweets, photo sharing sites, online news outlets, etc., all blended together on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

So how can your business optimize for all these different types of media now being included in the search results? By getting vertical.

Getting vertical is simply another way to think about your search engine strategy. Yes, you still need to effectively optimize your web site to do well in the search results. But in addition to that, you now must also optimize for the search “verticals” that contribute to blended search results as well.

For instance, Google determines its blended results (in part) by analyzing what ranks well in its search verticals, including image search, Google News, video search, and social networking information from Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed. That’s a lot of verticals to consider! But optimizing for blended search means that you need to have at least some sort of presence on these verticals to get Google’s attention and boost your position in the search rankings.

Social Networks

Since the major search engines now include real-time information from popular social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube, your search engine rankings can definitely benefit from implementing a social networking strategy. By participating on social networking sites, you contribute a constant stream of fresh information that not only benefits your customers and followers, but also helps get (and keep) the attention of the search engines as they gather new information from these real-time sources.

The key to being successful on the social networks, however, is to implement an integrated strategy that combines all of your social marketing efforts together with your web site and with the other marketing activities you may already have established. (See our web site or blog posts on Integrated Social Marketing (ISM)® for more details on this concept).

Online Videos

Videos can be optimized for blended search, whether on a web site, in a blog post, on a social networking site, or uploaded to a video sharing site like YouTube. In fact, video sharing sites already have built-in features that make it easy for users to share videos with friends and followers. They also allow viewers to leave comments or forward video links to their lists of contacts.

When using videos in your search strategy, be sure to add relevant descriptions and title tags to your videos, and rename the video files to include your targeted keywords in the filename for an added boost. Re-use your videos in as many places on the web as you can, including embedding them in your web pages and integrating them with your Google Place pages to help build authority for the videos as well.

News Content

Another source of blended search results comes from content found in online news from mainstream media outlets, in Google News, and on a variety of online newswire services. One way for small businesses to get online news coverage is to submit press releases to online media outlets, both paid and free, as a way to build quality inbound links and get additional exposure online. You should also try to include video and images in your press releases whenever possible. Multi-media content tends to do well – especially in Google News – and it provides additional press release content that can be indexed in the search databases.

Images and Photos

There are several ways that you can use images to contribute to your results in blended search. First, your images and photos should have keyword-rich file names, such as “keyword.jpg” or “my_company_at_eventname.jpg” whenever possible. Also, be sure to use keywords in your HTML image alt tags and in the descriptions and captions of the photos as well. Then, you can share these photos on your web site, on your blog, on your Facebook page (and other social profiles), and upload them to photo sharing sites like Flickr. Encourage your visitors to leave comments, and also leave your own comments, since this type of participation will also help provide fresh content and gain attention from the search engines as they gather real-time search information as well.

Think Vertical

So if you are serious about improving your business’ positions in the search engine rankings, you will need to expand the way you think about optimizing your entire search profile online. The more you can do to optimize the search “verticals” (like social networking, video, images, etc.), the more influence you will have over what the search engines know about your business and its relevance to searchers today. Thinking vertical can help you stay competitive now that blended search means competing with more than just other web sites.

If you are still not convinced that social media belongs in your marketing mix, keep reading. Social media marketing continues to gain momentum as a first-rate marketing vehicle, gaining favor over traditional marketing in many cases. For example, Pepsi will be skipping TV ads during this year’s Super Bowl and instead investing the ad dollars into social media marketing. Pepsi has been advertising during the Super Bowl for 23 years; yet now believes it can reach more viewers and get better results with social media than with TV advertising during the Super Bowl! That really says a lot about the state of social media marketing today.

But beyond being highly effective, a new study from Wetpaint and The Altimeter Group now shows that social media marketing can actually improve a company’s bottom line. The study revealed that companies who were the most engaged in social media marketing increased their revenues by 18% , versus companies not engaged in social media marketing, who showed an average decrease in revenues of 6%.

So if social media marketing is so effective that, as in the case of Pepsi’s Super Bowl ads, it can replace the traditional, and has also been shown to increase revenues by double-digits, it may be time to re-think your social media strategy!

What can your small business do to take advantage of the benefits that come from social media marketing? Here are some tips to get you started:

Start with the biggies: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

There are so many social marketing options available today that to establish (and then maintain) a presence on all of them would be virtually impossible for most small businesses. So instead of having a large number of profiles scattered among many different sites, try to focus your efforts on the “biggies” in the space. Currently, that includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Also, all of these have business profile options available for setting up business profiles and accounts.

Take advantage of advanced features.

These “biggies” also offer various advanced features that help extend the usefulness and marketing impact of social networking for your business. For instance, Facebook offers a Custom Tab feature that gives you additional pages in your profile for custom content. LinkedIn allows you to use RSS feeds from your blog or other resources, and YouTube video links can be easily embedded into your web pages, blog, and other social media.

Integrate everything to work together.

To get the maximum benefit of social media marketing, be sure to integrate your profiles to work seamlessly with each other. Your Facebook page should be able to “talk” to your web site, your Twitter “tweets” should display on your Facebook page, and your blog posts should be RSS-fed to your LinkedIn profile. This may take some outside professional expertise to help with the integration work, but it’s worth it in the time you’ll save in maintaining your social profiles and in the additional marketing reach your messages will have.

Maintain your branding among all your social media sites.

When setting up your social media profiles, be sure to use your existing logo, corporate colors, and the “look and feel” of your existing branding and web site. It’s important that you maintain consistency among all of your marketing channels to reinforce your company and your brand in all the places your customers and potential customers visit. Most social media sites allow for at least some level of customization.

Be committed to posting content regularly.

It doesn’t have to take a lot of time or resources to keep up with your social media marketing, but you do have to commit to spending at least a little time on a regular basis to maintain your social presence. If you have integrated your profiles, it will be easy to post new content and have it automatically propagate to the rest of your social channels without having to enter the same content over and over on different profiles. Of course, having a dedicated social media staff would be great, but it’s unrealistic for most small businesses. Instead, put together a social media strategy that outlines which social sites you want to use, what content you will post, and the person who will be responsible for posting your content on a regular basis.

By including social media marketing in your marketing mix, your small business gets an inexpensive, effective marketing strategy that not only improves your online visibility, but can also contribute to your bottom line as well. So if you’re looking for a way to boost your revenues this year, social marketing may be a good place to start.

If you’re not convinced that the social networking site Twitter can be useful for your small business, you’re not alone.  Twitter may have started out as a novel way for users to share random details about their lives (like what they had for breakfast or what movie they’re watching), but that is changing very quickly.  Businesses of all sizes are finding Twitter to be an effective online marketing tool, and there is growing evidence to suggest that the major search engines (like Google and Bing) are now starting to add Twitter “tweets” to their search results for users.

Why does that matter to your small business? Because using Twitter in your marketing mix means that it could also improve your visibility in the search engines. It’s another way to gain exposure for your business, get your business listed higher on the search results pages, and get your brand mentioned more often in the web resources that users still turn to the most – the search engines.

Here are a few reasons Twitter has become so valuable as a small business marketing tool:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Like most small businesses, you probably have invested at least some time, money, or both into optimizing your web site for the search engines (and if you haven’t, you already know that you should!).  Being active on Twitter can support those efforts and make your investment in SEO even more valuable.

Studies show that nearly 80% of people still turn to search engines first (mostly Google) when they look for products and services on the web, and that’s not likely to change any time soon.  Getting your business to show up for your most important keywords and phrases is just as important as ever, and using Twitter can help attract the attention of the search engines, and improve the chances that they will include your business in the search results.

Qualified Traffic – Often, the traffic that comes from being active on Twitter is highly qualified, since users have already opted-in to follow you and are interested in what you have to say.

Real-Time Search – Social networking sites have really pushed the search engines into focusing on how to add real-time search to their results, since sites like Twitter are excellent at providing users with news as it happens.  On Twitter, users can search for news and events and get instant, up-to-the-minute results, where a search engine’s results may be hours, days, or even years old.  It’s only a matter of time before the search engines have real-time search rolled into their results, making your Twitter activity more powerful.

Viral Marketing – Because social networking is so popular with users, the information you provide to your Twitter followers can travel all over the web as they share your “tweets” with their networks of friends and colleagues, who then share with their networks, and so on.  Your tweets are also not limited to Twitter users, either, since people can pull your tweets into their Facebook pages, link to them on a blog, put them in their bookmark lists on Delicious, etc.

Building Relationships – Twitter, as with other social networking sites, is all about providing something of value to your followers, and being a part of the overall conversation happening online today.  Customers want to connect with the companies that they do business with, and they are participating with businesses in a whole new way.  Twitter can help you build those strong relationships with customers that can increase brand loyalty and help you stay top-of-mind.

Constant Innovation – The speed with which new social networking applications, ideas, and features come out means your small business must find ways to stay in front of customers, no matter where those customers are.  Twitter has only been in existence for a couple of years, which means it is just getting started in building up its repertoire of gadgets, widgets, and applications that people will find useful.  By using Twitter now, your small business will be poised to take advantage of these new innovations as they come along. It can also give you a significant advantage over competitors who may have to play catch-up with building up followers and establishing their own presence in the social space.

No Time to Waste
Twitter, like many other social networking sites, is changing the way small businesses market online, and it’s a change for the better.  Twitter is a free service, it’s easy to use, can be customized, and is a great way to boost your presence online.  Your Twitter efforts can also increase your customers’ loyalty to your brand and your company, and meets a need that consumers themselves revealed to you by opting-in to follow you in the first place.  And now that Google and Bing have announced the upcoming inclusion of Twitter “tweets” in their search results, Twitter can support your SEO efforts like never before as well.

Clearly, Twitter can be categorized as many different things (a viral marketing tool, customer service channel, SEO strategy, etc.), but a waste of time?  Just the opposite.

It seems that a lot of big companies today (with big marketing budgets) have managed to jump right into social marketing and successfully use sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in their everyday marketing activities. However, it also seems that small businesses are lagging behind the social marketing trend, even though it is a very low cost marketing channel that almost any small business can afford (the sites are free to use; all it typically costs is time!).

So why are so many small businesses hesitant about social marketing, or seemingly scared of using social networking sites as part of their regular marketing activities?

It could be as simple as not having the time to take on a new marketing activity, or maybe a lack of familiarity with sites like Facebook and Twitter makes them seem hard to use. It’s also possible they’re concerned about negative comments showing up on social media web sites, or worried about employees using these tools appropriately for business. Whatever the reasons, social media marketing is here to stay, and small businesses are going to have to face their fears if they hope to leverage its value as a marketing tool and stay relevant with their customers today.

If you are one of the millions of small businesses afraid of jumping in to social marketing, here are five good reasons you should overcome your fears:

1. Your customers already expect it – More than 86% of consumers recently surveyed by marketing agency Prodo said that they believe companies should incorporate social marketing into their regular marketing activities. Add that to the fact that Facebook now has more than 300 million users, Twitter has experienced quadruple-digit growth this year alone, and more than 50% of online Americans use social networking sites on a daily basis, and you can clearly see where your customers are spending their time. Put simply: you need to be there, too.
2. Social marketing has become mainstream – Think back a few years to when many small businesses didn’t have web sites yet. They thought “sure, it would be nice to have a web site, but it’s not really necessary for my business.” Now, of course, most small businesses have at least a basic web presence, and web sites are considered a standard part of doing business. The same is happening today with social marketing, and it won’t be long until it is considered just as standard as having a web site.
3. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time – When implemented properly, social marketing can be a quick, easy marketing activity that can be seamlessly blended with your regular marketing activities. By integrating your social networking profiles with each other, with your web site, and with your existing marketing initiatives, you can minimize the time spent on social networking while maximizing the return on your investment. It’s no longer an option to just do nothing – if you need help developing a social networking strategy, find a professional to help you.
4. Your message can reach a vastly larger audience – By using social marketing, you increase your reach online to potentially thousands (or millions!) of people who may not otherwise have a chance to see your message or know your company. Rather than waiting for visitors to find your web site and discover your business, social marketing allows your message to travel further through the social channels you use, as well as through viral events where people share your information with their own networks of friends and associates.
5. Ignoring social marketing will not make it go away – Like it or not, social marketing is quickly becoming the way in which smart businesses connect and communicate with their customers and potential customers. It not only improves a small business’ web visibility, but can also improve search engine rankings (Google already includes results from social sites, blogs, videos, and other alternative media along with regular web site results), and can help create “buzz” about a small business as well.

So if you have been apprehensive about adding social networking to your marketing mix, there’s no better time to face your fears and get serious about using this technology to enhance your online presence, reach new prospects, and meet your customers’ expectations with social marketing. The longer you wait to jump in, the larger the gap grows between “outstanding” and “overlooked”.

As I’m sure you know by now, social networking is the hottest new marketing trend for business of all sizes, including small businesses. But without a dedicated marketing department or a big budget available, it can seem like an overwhelming task to just figure out what to do with social networking, or how to get started with it.

So before you jump in and create a Facebook page or a Twitter account, here are five steps you can follow to make it easier to get your own social networking strategy in place, and also to develop a plan to keep it going for the best possible results with the least amount of additional work for you and your staff.

1. Start with your goals.

Start by determining your business goals for using social networking to promote and market your business. By establishing these goals, you can stay focused on what you want to achieve, and concentrate on the things that will help your business the most.

Some goals to consider include:

• Reaching new potential customers that may not otherwise come in contact with your business
• Getting your message to spread virally through the social networks
• Improving online visibility for your business
• Making a good impression on customers (let’s face it, a social networking presence is an expectation of many consumers today)
• Gaining an edge over your competition
• Building inbound links and improving search engine rankings

These are just a few possible goals, of course. Your goals will depend on the specific needs of your business.

2. Pick a few social networking sites to start with.

The best strategy for many small businesses is to select three or four social networking sites that will give them good “coverage” in the social space. We typically set up our clients in Facebook, Twitter, and either YouTube or LinkedIn, since these are fairly easy to use and they integrate well in an overall social marketing strategy (we will talk about integration in Step 3, next).

It’s also a good idea to customize your profiles and use your company’s existing branding (logo, colors, tagline, graphics, look & feel, etc.) to provide consistency among profiles, give profiles a more professional look, and make it easy for users to recognize and remember your business.

3. Integrate your social networking profiles with your web site and other marketing initiatives.

By integrating your social networking profiles, you can avoid creating social networking “islands” that end up creating extra work for you and/or your staff, where you have to manage and maintain each profile individually. Instead, an integrated social marketing strategy means that you “write once, publish to many” in an organized, well-thought-out strategy that benefits your business and is efficient for your staff to maintain going forward.

For instance, let’s say your monthly e-newsletter has just been published (and sent to your emailing list as part of your regular monthly marketing activities). Now imagine that you want to further publicize the new issue, and also provide links to your web site where additional readers can find it.

With an integrated strategy in place, you can send out ONE announcement that could automatically be posted to your Facebook page, sent out as a “tweet” in Twitter, fed to your account in LinkedIn, published through an RSS feed on your web site, and even added as a new post in your blog. In this integrated example, your announcement would have been posted instantly in five separate places on the web, with just ONE action on your part. That’s the power of integration.

4. Create a Content Pipeline

Once you have your social networking profiles set up and integrated correctly, it’s a great idea to create a content pipeline of items you can use to regularly update your profiles and communicate with your readers.

Start your content pipeline by looking at the marketing activities you are already doing. Do you send out an e-newsletter each month? Post regularly to your blog? Do you run ads in monthly publications, or send out coupons? Do you use Google Adwords or advertise with web banner ads? Do you send out press releases or sponsor community events? Almost anything that you are already doing can be re-purposed and used in your content pipeline.

Once you have a list of items to use, pull out your calendar and put together a basic schedule for adding content to your social networking profiles each week (or month). Remember, if you have an integrated social networking strategy in place, it will be quick and easy to add the content once and have it automatically distributed to all your social profiles at the same time.

5. Track and Measure Results

Like any other marketing initiative in your business, you need to monitor your results in order to know if it’s working and if you are meeting your goals. The same is true for your social networking strategy.

To help you do this, there are many free monitoring tools available online, such as Twilerts or TweetBeep (for Twitter), Technorati RSS Alerts, and Google Alerts that can help you track instances of your company’s name, product, people, etc. when (or if) they are mentioned online.

Also, you can watch your web site stats to see if your social networking strategy is helping to drive additional traffic to your site, and also find out which pages are getting the most traffic. Over time, it should become clear if your social networking strategy is helping you achieve your goals, or if you need to make some adjustments to improve your results.

By using these five steps to build a social networking strategy, you can create a plan to help your business take advantage of this new and powerful method of web marketing, while keeping the additional work load to a minimum for you and your staff.

NOTE:

Five Sparrows now offers its trademarked Integrated Social Marketing (ISM)™ services to small businesses and non-profit organizations that want to use social marketing, but don’t have the staff, expertise, or time necessary to set up, implement, and integrate social networking for their businesses.

If you have been considering social marketing for your business but don’t have the time, staff, or knowledge necessary to implement it, call us today for a free consultation, or click here for more information.