How to Use Social Media to Boost SEO: 5 Strategies

SUMMARY: You’ve adopted SEO best practices for website architecture, content and inbound links. Where do you turn next?
Social media channels can create keyword-rich content and links that boost your search rankings. Here are 5 strategies for generating conversations and links in the Web 2.0 world from a company that has achieved the top organic placement for several industry terms.

Marketers looking for new SEO tactics often focus on the mechanics of search engines. Instead, marketers should examine the kind of sites that increasingly show up in search results, says John Fischer, Owner, Sticker Giant, a site that has achieved the top organic placement for terms like “Stickers” and “Custom Stickers.”
“If you scan the first page of results, more and more sites come up that are social networking sites,” he says. “You find Twitter, Facebook, blogs, videos -- these are not static websites. These are things that have a human being front and center.”
The rise of these social media sites offers marketers a new channel for communicating with customers to create enormous SEO benefits. By reaching out to the members of those communities and encouraging customers to talk about your company and products, you can create keyword-rich content and inbound links that raise your profile with the search-engine spiders.
Fischer and his team use a wide-ranging approach to social media that’s helped their website, Stickergiant.com, dominate their industry’s organic rankings. The site is the number-one result on Google for such broad terms as:
o Stickers
o Custom stickers
o Sticker printing
o Political stickers
o Funny stickers
Top five strategies for using social media channels in SEO efforts:
Strategy #1. Be everywhere your customers are
Fischer’s social media efforts encourage conversations about Sticker Giant all over the Web. For that reason, his team participates in seven major social media channels:
o Blip.tv
o Facebook
o Flickr
o LinkedIn
o MySpace
o Twitter
o YouTube
“When I was in college, I tried to go to all the parties,” says Fischer. “Now you can be at all the parties at the same time.”
The team includes links to each of those accounts on the company’s blog page.
Strategy #2. Choose a real person to interact with social communities
Fischer manages and maintains the accounts personally – although his team uses Sticker Giant for the account name in each of those online communities.
“It’s all me in these communities -- John Fischer, not Sticker Giant,” he says. “It shows customers that I’m a real person who is here to help you. I’m not going to rip you off.”
In each account, Fischer provides his own email address and phone number to encourage interaction with customers.
Strategy #3. Blog about your customers and their passions
Like many marketers, Fischer uses his blog as a cornerstone of his SEO efforts. Blogs create lots of new content and generate links back to your site that help with search engine coverage.
Rather than focus on the company itself, Fischer uses his blog to highlight interesting customers and the stickers they’ve created.
“People are excited about their business, their club, their band -- whatever it is they’re promoting,” says Fischer. “That’s what the sticker is about and that’s what I want to talk about.”
- Fischer’s blog posts feature images of new customers’ stickers, along with:
o Brief stories about the customer
o Description of their business, band, blog, etc.
o Details about the sticker design or printing process.
- He posts a new customer story at least once a day, and often creates several new entries a day.
- By posting about a customer’s sticker project, he increases the chances of that customer linking back to the Sticker Giant blog post, and sharing the link with friends – something he sees often.
- At the bottom of each blog post, Fischer features icons that let readers share the article on community and social bookmarking sites, such as:
o Slashdot
o Reddit
o Digg
o StumbleUpon
The team also allows visitors to bookmark or add images to their social networking profiles of all the stickers sold in the Sticker Giant online store. “That generates links and sales,” he says.
Strategy #4. Create and promote videos
Search engines increasingly incorporate videos onto search results pages. Marketers need to incorporate videos into their outreach strategies.
Fischer’s team uses several approaches for creating videos:
Weekly features on new custom sticker projects
Like Fischer’s blog posts, Sticker Giant’s videos highlight interesting stories about printing projects and the customers who requested them. A Sticker Giant employee hosts these weekly features.
Short promotional videos for new stickers in the retail store
Fischer has a video camera in his office to record short promotional videos for new products. For example, the day after the presidential election, he created a 42-second video describing a line of new Obama victory stickers.
Instructional videos about Sticker Giant
Fischer also creates videos that describe Sticker Giant’s services and product offerings. For example, one video explains the company’s sticker product line for rapid turnaround projects. Another introduces customers to the company’s client services team.
“Thank You” videos for custom orders
Fischer also has recorded three short videos of himself thanking customers for interacting with the company:
o Thank you for requesting information about custom printing
o Thank you for submitting material for a custom printing project
o Thank you for ordering a sticker from a retail store
The team emails the appropriate video to customers. The goal is to get them to tell their friends about the video or post it to their blog or social networking page.
Strategy #5. Talk on Twitter, but listen too
Fischer is a big Twitter fan. It gives him the ability to stay in frequent communication with customers and friends. Sticker Giant’s Twitter account has 484 followers and, as with all the company’s other social media accounts, Fischer handles most of the communication in the channel.
Besides personal conversations with friends, Fischer’s typical posts include:
- Notifications of new blog posts, with a link to the page.
- Random samplings of recent purchases from Sticker Giant’s retail store.
Several times a day, Fischer will tweet the first name and location of a new customer, along with a link to the sticker they bought, such as, “Anna from PA just bought one of these”.
“Most people on Twitter know Sticker Giant as a printing company, so those Tweets are out there to say we have all this other cool stuff, too.”
Fischer also monitors Twitter posts to keep track of discussions related to stickers.
- The team uses RSS feeds from Twitter monitoring services, such as Tweetscan, to update them on any tweets related to stickers.
- An employee monitors those feeds and looks for opportunities to join the conversation with relevant information. For example, if a Twitter user asks the community for advice about a sticker printing project, the team member can offer technical advice to begin a conversation.
All of Sticker Giant’s social media efforts focus on creating links and conversations that help the team maintain their relevance and high organic rankings.
“Our increase in search rankings is because we are interacting with people more,” says Fischer. “When you do that, they’re going to blog about you, Tweet about you, talk about you in their Facebook profiles. However they exchange information with their peers and friends on social networks, they’re going to talk about you.”

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30968&pop=no#

Video’s Role in Your Marketing: 6 Proven Tactics to Support Lead Gen and Search

SUMMARY: The release of our first Video Marketing Benchmark Guide got us thinking about the role marketers see video playing down the road. So, we turned to the past to find tactics with proven results.
TV and online channels are common tactics, but there are other options for incorporating video into your marketing mix. Here are six video tactics that can complement lead generation, email campaigns, and product launches.

When B2B marketers consider using video for a campaign, they tend to think first of TV spots or viral videos. But there is a much broader role for video in marketing strategies.
With careful planning, you can use video to:
o Generate leads
o Support product launches
o Recruit employees
o Raise product and brand awareness
Want to find a new role for video in your marketing campaigns? Here are six ideas from MarketingSherpa Case Studies with proven results.
Six tactics for your video marketing strategy:

Tactic #1. Create “edutainment” videos for lead generation
White papers, webinars and other educational content are key elements of a lead generation campaign. But your prospects may be so overwhelmed with white paper or webinar offers that your content gets lost in the mix.
Grab prospects’ attention with a video that places valuable educational content in an entertaining context. Kristi Kennelly, Director Marketing, Interthinx, created fraud-detection training videos for the mortgage industry that parodied the film “Charlie’s Angels” and the TV franchise “CSI.”
The lighthearted films turned highly technical information into a must-see program for the team’s key prospects in the mortgage industry. A premiere at a trade show generated so much buzz that they received 700 orders even before the DVD set was released, ultimately creating 1,200 qualified leads.
Click here for that Case Study:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30810

Tactic #2. Use streaming video to complement live events
Conferences, seminars or other events don’t have to be done only in person or only online. You can combine a real-world event with a streaming video component to reach a broader audience, generate leads, or support a product launch.
Dan Caron, Product Launch Manager, Strategic Profits, an online training company, did all three with a streaming video campaign. His team invited prospects to watch a webcast of the keynote presentation from a sold-out customer conference. Then, at the end of the presentation, the team made a special offer on a new training program to webcast attendees.
Results:
- Special offer sold out in 6 minutes.
- Product launch generated $2.8 million in sales on the first day.
- 40,000 new names were added to their marketing database through the live-stream event and the archived video on the website.
Click here for their Case Study:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=29940

Tactic #3. Test embedded video in email campaigns
Delivering emails with embedded multimedia files can be a challenge. But marketers who’ve overcome the technical hurdles report strong results.
Barbara Shimaitis, Sr. VP, Ad Council, wanted to use email to reach TV station managers with a request to run the council’s public service announcements. They combined a direct-mail campaign, which sent DVDs of the spots, with a follow-up email that reminded managers of the request to run the PSA. The email contained embedded videos of the PSA, which began playing automatically in the email message, or in a new browser window.
The video-emails achieved:
o 47% higher open rate than that of average ones
o 69% higher clickthrough rate
o $1.9 billion worth of air time for their PSAs
Click here for the Case Study:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=29985

Tactic #4. Create recruiting videos to attract top job candidates
Kendall Harrell, Manager, Organizational Development, Life Time Fitness, turned to online video to achieve two important goals in his recruiting efforts:
- Giving job candidates a clear, compelling representation of the company’s work environment.
- Giving details on the ideal candidate for a position, to improve the quality of job applications.
Harrell and his team created recruiting videos using real employees describing their jobs and the working environment at the fitness chain. The 2.5 minute videos were unscripted, but edited to convey important messages about the opportunities at the company. Messages stated that trainers were full-time employees, not independent contractors, for instance, and that managers were able to participate in a high-growth organization.
After placing the videos on their website, the team achieved:
o 7%-30% increase in applications for key positions
o 26%-111% increase in the number of applications passing pre-screening qualification
Click here for the Case Study:http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30106

Tactic #5. Provide video tours of product/services
A short online video often can give prospects a faster understanding of your product or service than written content, such as data sheets, promotional copy, or FAQs.
Steve Johnson, Director Online Media, Total Training, used video product guides to promote the technical training firm’s new series of online programs. He and his team created:
o General introduction to the service, which provided an overview of the features and functionality of the online training program
o Video summary guides for the scope of the training sessions available in each program.
The introductory overview became one of the most viewed links on the company’s site, and helped boost subscriptions 40%.
Click here for the Case Study:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=29842

Tactic #6. Assemble video library on content-sharing sites
You create a piece of video for a specific marketing campaign. Then consider adding that content to a branded channel on a video-sharing site, such as YouTube or Blip.tv.
Third-party sites can act as your video archive, and provide you with a valuable lead generation, brand marketing or search-engine optimization channel. For example Gary Drenik, President & CEO, BIGResearch, offers video newsletters to highlight his team’s research on the retail industry. But they also post that content to video-sharing sites, alongside clips of television appearances by researchers and other video content.
The technique allows them to make the most of their investment in video resources by promoting them on multiple channels.

 

Click here for the Case Study:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30150

Paid Search Tops List of Marketing Tactics for Viral Success

SUMMARY: Take a sneak peek at some data from our first Video Marketing Benchmark Guide. You’ll get an idea of the promotion tactics’ effect on viral success. All tactics get "mixed results" but paid search definitely tops the field.

Effect of Promotion Tactics on Viral Success Rate

Click here to see larger, printable version of this chart
Here’s a sneak peek at information from MarketingSherpa’s first Video Marketing Benchmark Guide – the most recent addition to the series.
Viral marketers need to remember that the point of viral marketing is not the fact that it’s free – it’s its ability to spread buzz inexpensively. While it may seem counterintuitive, the best way to promote free video is to pay for it.
For example, most marketers rated paid-search links “great” as a promotional tactic for spreading buzz. This makes sense; after all, viral advertisers tend to be niche marketers who have trouble reaching their audience with mass media. And, paid search is a proven method for reaching hyper-specific audiences.
Search marketers may cringe at the idea that search is becoming the next big branding medium. But that fact can no longer be denied – it is.
Paid media promotion in ads and blogs, along with traditional PR, are also effective ways of promoting viral media and, if done right, can be inexpensive. The free methods are the most likely ones to be tried, but the least likely ones to succeed.
That’s OK. Failure is an option when the cost is low, and the potential for reward is high. Another takeaway: Don’t bank on one option to spread videos virally. Given the success rate of promotion tactics, we’d recommend making modest investments in all of them.

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30953&pop=no

Advertisers Face Hurdles on Social Networking Sites

By RANDALL STROSS

Published: December 13, 2008

FOR some time, Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest advertiser, has been dipping its big toes into the vast pool of Facebook, now the world’s largest social network. I recently knocked on the doors of both companies to hear how the experiment was going. Neither was inclined to say much.

Enlarge This Image

The “America’s Favorite Stains” campaign, offered on Facebook by Procter & Gamble, asks for members’ ideas. It recently displayed 18 submissions.

Independent experts on Web advertising have been watching, however, and what they see is a myriad of difficulties in making brand advertising work on social networking sites. Members of social networks want to spend time with friends, not brands.

When major brands place banner advertisements on the side of a member’s home page, they pay inexpensive prices, but the ads receive little attention. Seth Goldstein, co-founder of SocialMedia Networks, an online advertising company, wrote on his Facebook blog that a banner ad “is universally disregarded as irrelevant if it’s not ignored entirely.”

When advertisers invite members to come to pages dedicated to their products, they can attract visitors only by investing in expensive creative material or old-fashioned promotions like prize contests.

And when they try to take advantage of new “social advertising,” extending their commercial message to a member’s friends, their ads will be noticed, all right, but not necessarily favorably. Members are understandably reluctant to become shills. IDC, the technology research firm, published a study last month that reported that just 3 percent of Internet users in the United States would willingly let publishers use their friends for advertising. The report described social advertising as “stillborn.”

All Web sites that rely on ads struggle to a greater or lesser extent to convert traffic, even high traffic, into meaningful revenue. Ads that run on Google and other search engines are a profitable exception because their visitors are often in a buying mood. Other kinds of sites, however, can’t deliver similar visitors to advertisers. Google’s own YouTube, which relies heavily, like Facebook, on user-generated content, remains a costly experiment in the high-traffic, low-revenue ad business.

Financial data would show the current state of Facebook’s advertising, but none are available. Facebook is privately held and a spokesman told me that it does not disclose revenue or any information about its ad sales.

As for P.& G, the company permits Facebook to talk about the results of only a single P.& G. promotion, presumably its most successful to date: for Crest Whitestrips. The promotion began in fall 2006, when P.& G. invited Facebook members in 20 college campus networks to become Crest Whitestrips “fans” on the product’s Facebook Page. Facebook said it was a great success, attracting 14,000 fans.

One could argue, however, that with the additional enticements that Crest provided — thousands of free movie screenings, as well as sponsored Def Jam concerts — a brand of hemorrhoid cream could have attracted a similar number of nominal “fans.”

Becoming a “fan” required nothing more than a single click. When Facebook talks about its 130 million members worldwide, it’s careful to include only active members, defined as those who have logged on within the past 30 days. But when it shows the total number of “fans” on a sponsor’s page, it treats all fans as active.

Without endless investment, these sorts of promotions sputter out. More than 4,000 of the onetime 14,000 Facebook fans of Crest Whitestrips have left the fan club.

Outside of official brand pages, Facebook offers space on members’ personal pages that are viewed many billions of times monthly. I ran a small-scale test ad myself over two weeks and paid a varying rate that dropped and dropped, and on the last day would have permitted me to place the add on one million pages for only $80. But companies generally do not like the idea of their brand sharing space with unvetted material supplied by users. The IDC report said, “Brand advertisers largely consider user-generated content as low-quality, brand-unsafe inventory.”

At a conference last month sponsored by the Advertising Club of Cincinnati, Ted McConnell, manager of interactive marketing and innovation at P.& G., said, “I really don’t want to buy any more banner ads in Facebook.” His remarks were offered as his personal reflections, not the official position of his employer, and were available on the Web in a podcast of the talk. A spokeswoman for P.& G. later told me that the company “is committed to our strong relationship with Facebook” and had used the site for “roughly a dozen P.& G. brands,” either previously or currently.

Facebook’s ability to aim at particular demographic groups is impressive, Mr. McConnell told the club. As an experiment, he and a colleague set up an ad that would target all Facebook members who were 22- to 27-year old women, who worked for P.& G., were left-leaning and living in Cincinnati, and who liked sex and Cocoa Puffs. Facebook provided one person who perfectly fit the profile. Speaking not as an advertiser but as a prospective recipient of such highly personalized messaging, Mr. McConnell said, “I’m not so sure I want to be targeted like that.”

Brand pages won’t make anyone uncomfortable about privacy issues. But one has to have a compelling reason to seek out these pages. The P.& G. spokeswoman pointed me to its “2X Ultra Tide” page. Here one finds an 11-month-old campaign, “American’s Favorite Stains,” where members can post their “favorite places to enjoy stain-making moments!” When I checked last week, it displayed a grand total of just 18 submissions, including two from P.& G., two from someone at The Onion and one-word posts like “Tidealicious!”

In his remarks to the club, Mr. McConnell said, “All brands want consumers to be their ‘friends.’ Oh, boy, do they!” But speaking for himself, he said he had reservations about the very premise. “I don’t want to be best friends with a brand,” he said. “It’s just stuff.”

TOM ARRIX, a regional vice president for sales at Facebook, said that as a new option, the company began offering “engagement ads” this fall. These ads are accompanied by an invitation for a member to take some action besides just looking at the ad or viewing an embedded video, but without leaving the page. A “Become a Fan” button could be offered, for example. Herbal Essence shampoo, a P.& G. product, has run such ads since September, but neither P.& G. nor Facebook would comment on the results so far.

Mr. Goldstein of SocialMedia Networks describes a self-perpetuating cycle in social networks: “Advertisers distract users; users ignore advertisers; advertisers distract better; users ignore better.”

Brand advertisers on Facebook can try one of two new approaches. They can be more intrusive, but the outcome will not be positive. Or they can create genuinely entertaining commercials, but spend ungodly sums to do so.

When Facebook convinces advertisers to stage Super Bowl-sized entertainment every day, its future will be assured.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/business/media/14digi.html

Snapshot of Media Plans & Budgets For 2009

At the "Masters of Marketing" Conference held recently by the Association of National Advertisers, 1,200 client-side marketers, media and creative agencies and others, were polled via handheld devices about their marketing mix, budgets, plans, and tactics throughout the event. The results are shown here:

Adjustment to current marketing and media plans to account for the recent downturn in the financial markets:

• 33% say spending will be reduced
• 33% say spending will be constant / marketing mix will be reallocated
• 27% expect to spend more
• 8%  will keep everything status quo

CEO view of marketing efforts with respect to growth:

• 56% think of brand-building as an investment
• 21% think it's an unaccountable but necessary expense
• 15% are not sure
• 8% consider it an unnecessary expense

Preferred social media site for driving brand growth:

• 32% say none
• 20% say YouTube
• 18% Facebook
• 12% like them all
• 10% say LinkedIn
• 6% MySpace
• 3% Twitter

Plans for Marketing expense in 2009 vs. 2008:

• 26% plan to increase spending more than 10%
• 13% plan to increase spending less than 10%
• 28% will hold stable
• 14% will decrease spending less than 10%
• 19% will decrease spending more than 10%

The largest branding discipline offering opportunity for growth:

• 17% choose traditional 30-second spots
• 7% like one page advertisements in a newspaper/magazine
• 16% pick web advertising
• 28% choose social media integration
• 7% feel direct Marketing
• 19% think grassroots, viral public relations
• 5% like radio

Company's current measurement method of brand growth:

• 70% say sales and net income
• 15% use third party brand equity valuations
• 9% think shareholder value
• 4% measure by household penetration
• 3% say company culture

Source: Association of National Advertisers, October 2008

TV Viewing and Internet Use Converge

According to the The Nielsen TV/Internet Convergence Panel, the heaviest users of the Internet are also among the heaviest viewers of television: the top fifth of Internet users spend more than 250 minutes per day watching television, compared to 220 minutes of television viewing by people who do not use the Internet at all. Nielsen found that the reverse is true as well - the lowest consumers of television have the lowest usage levels for the Internet.

The study shows that nearly 31% of in-home Internet activity takes place while the user is watching television, demonstrating that there is a significant amount of simultaneous Internet and television usage. Conversely, about 4% of television viewing occurs when the consumer is also using the Internet.

Other findings from Nielsen's TV/Internet Convergence Panel include:

50% of the Convergence Panel panelists had viewed some streaming content online. The demographics of those streaming the most were:

• 82% of female teen panelists viewed streaming content
• 64% of male teens
• 57% or men 18-34
• 55% of men 35-54

Nearly 60% of panelists and more than 80% of people who watched TV and used the Internet that month had simultaneous sessions - watching TV and being online at the same minute. This group tends to be very heavy users of both TV and Internet.

Teens are the most likely demographic to have simultaneous TV/Internet usage, but Adults 35-54 have the most simultaneous usage minutes.

Howard Shimmel, Senior Vice President Client Insights, The Nielsen Company, says "It is too early to draw... firm conclusions about behavior... but... early trends... indicate that online usage is complementing, not substituting for, traditional television viewing... "

For additional information, please visit here.