Business Integration of Social Media Marketing
Maxwell Finn
Social media marketing, while its concept and fundamentals have been around for a while, has changed remarkably in the past six months. There was a time when a social media link building campaign was very easy. The big search engines valued domains like Squidoo and MySpace to the extent that your profiles could easily rank for targeted keywords. It should come as no surprise that this is no longer the case.
Using social media as an effective link building tactic is still possible but it is no longer as easy as creating profiles, submitting content to social news sites and dominating search engine results pages. It is both fortunate and unfortunate that Google has severely toughened up its standards for sites like MySpace. For marketers, it means a lot more work. For users, it means far less noise and spam in their search results.
Social media optimization is now a relatively delicate process. Traditional link building campaigns often involve blatantly asking for links, or simply buying them. In contrast, social media optimization is only effective if a marketer can convince others to link to material, not by asking, but by creating fantastic content. Most people’s accounts and profiles on social media websites are intrinsically attached to their offline self. Unlike people who run a website that includes a designated “Links” page, social media users are not likely to add a company’s profile as a “friend” or vote for a company’s content just because they’re asked to. The majority of people want their user history on sites like Digg and Reddit, and their friend lists on MySpace and Facebook to reflect something about their personalities. The less socially appealing and more exploited your industry is offline, the harder it will be for you to take advantage of online communities.
The landscape of social media is constantly changing. There is no profile, site or community whose content does not change hourly or, at the most, daily. “Traditional” social media link building, in most respects, was solely spam. Marketers realized that they could get quick, easy non-nofollowed links out of domains whose authority had already been established. There was little need to build a community and, in actual fact, a company who created a spam profile for the sake of linking to their actual websites would not have wanted to attract a great deal of traffic to the profile itself. The primary goal was to have search engine spiders see the profile and the links, add the weight of the links to the authority of the company’s main website and improve the main website’s ranking.
Search engines no longer lend any value whatsoever to links from areas like MySpace profiles. This is not to say, however, that MySpace and its peers are completely useless now; it just means that optimizing with these sites is no longer the simple process it was a few years ago. Search engines and social media website owners alike are aware that the point of social media is not to simply give marketers an easy collection of links. Marketers must now be prepared to contribute to the communities that can send them traffic.
The chart below displays the main benefits of using social media marketing, accoding to US marketing executives.
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Reader Comments (10)
My view is that the process of "getting found" via search engines has been turned on its head. Instead of first optimizing and link-building to generate customer interest via search engines, the better strategy is to join communities, blog, add comments, and create interest through ideas and content first, then worry about the search engines (or let them find you). It seems the more social media engagement you do (that adds real value), the more popular you become in terms of inbound links and the higher you climb in SEO rankings. Both are important, but the main effort needs to be put into engagement rather than trying to "game" Google onto the first page.
As Herb Cohen says, "The twin pillars of career mobility are exposure and visibility."
I guess this means, "Expose yourself and don't be shy about it if you have something visible!"
Seriously, for SEO, the visibility part is the one to watch. Visibility involves moving from
the background to the foreground, and gestalt psychology discovered long ago that visibility involves using gestalt rules. In the Web, especially what we'll see in Web 3, the new dimension will be on "tracks in the ether," as it were. We will be hooking up idiosyncratic vocabularies and perl, etc. So far, I've found Uniqueness to be effective. This is maximized by making up new words in the vocabulary and using the new words across all fronts. Look up "NiduScope," for example.
Perhaps most importantly, many webmasters have neutered the marketing arm because of excessive robot filtering. Don't forget that robots gossip, and they know what's going on. Just ask spinn3r. We have spent 30 years training computers to memorize and display. Now, it's time for them to become more than glorified word processors. It's time for them to learn. We can talk about Web 3 forever, describing it, hashing it and rehashing it,
making buckets, etc., etc., or we can birth it. To me, this means starting with vocabulary and seeing what magic can be discovered for the learning ontologies.
Arise, men of Science! Report to the boiler room immediately!
social media profiles are ok for link building but there are other options to get links and advertise for your business. Article directories, forum posting, and blog commenting are still effective ways to get links. Plus there are video marketing sites like Adwido, which is in a class of it's own but still often presents the opportunity to get a link in the description section.
Never before in the history of mankind has it been easier to reach out to people all over the world. Online communitieslike MySpace, make meeting new friends with similar interests incredibly easy. MySpace is a great place to share tips, ideas and stories about the things you find most interesting. If you have a question about your hobby, you can easily find the answer through your network of members with similar interests.
James
Email marketing software
Really good information ! Thanks a lot for this useful post !Good post!
You should write more about this!w
Previously, content was queen, relevant content was king and no variety of content formats is taking precedence. You'll notice more photos and videos popping up in search engine results. I haven't done the studies but I'm thinking the search engines are slowing moving towards greater interest in and a more favorable attitude towards multimedia content over traditional text based content. Now the search engines need a way to transcribe all this video and multi media format so that is can categoried and added to the searches in a more contextual manner which is less reliant upon the tagging system currently in place.
Tagging is a great way to have content be recognized by the search engines but has high probability of being mis-used, mis-categoried and mis-interpreted by the engines...
Combining video with a text, sell sheet, transcription would probably yeild better results...
Why isn't there any links to a larger screen shot of your well done images? I'd like to print the chart out.
Excellent post, excellent visual representation of the SMM landscape. I highly 2nd John M's comment that by being involved in multiple social media networks and contributing GOOD content will go far with your like minded SMM network and the search engines will eventually reward you accordingly (probably faster) if your SEO and Link building efforts are also in sync.
Without using the actual term, you guys exemplified in your killer diagram a concept I was recently exposed to via 10,000 seat webinar audience on SMM duly coined as "Triangulation".
My Personal Squidoo and Hub Pages content has fallen off sharply for the reasons mentioned, which is a bit of a sour pill to me since, both of the platforms were a core component in my mix. I wouldn't count either of them out, but it will be interesting to see how they morph or reinvent themselves these next few months.
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Sara
http://smallbusinessgrant.info
A mere online presence won’t serve the purpose of reaching out and impressing your target audience, to beat the competition you need a well designed website with a good search rank and for that you need help of companies which provide complete solutions in website designing and development and search engine optimization.