Are you getting (non paid) web traffic and leads from social networking websites? I am working on a comprehensive strategy to improve "Referring Social Network Traffic". The business goals of using social sites include building brand exposure, creating customer relationships and bringing traffic back to the original website. This works the same for personal branding and corporate web marketing plans. Now you can automate the delivery of content to each of the social networking websites and stay consistently activate. This results in improving your "Referring Social Network Traffic". The key is to make it really easy for customers to connect (friend) and find you on ALL of the social networks so the audience consistently increases. I think, all of your personal and/or business profiles need a consistent look and feel to ensure brand consistency.
Your website or blog needs to have a "Social Networking" section. This area should be very easy to find and include clickable icons with text links. You can also use Lijit and automate the icons that show up on your website, plus track those subscriptions.
Make sure your company or brand is easy to find in a search query on the popular social networking sites. This can be done by using target keyword phrases or tags in the personal profiles, business profiles and groups you create. Example: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and ect should all have a consistent about me section in the profile messaging that includes target keywords.
Companies need to move marketing dollars into video. This is especially important since YouTube is owned by Google. Video is an essential part of universal search. Naming and tagging your videos with keywords make them show up better in search results. Tip - Try TubeMogul and you can upload one video, then distribute it to ten sites at once, plus tag and track them all in once place.
Automate the content updates for ALL social networking sites. For example, with Twitter you can update your status on Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, SocialThing, FriendFeed and more. You can also automatically make your new YouTube videos show up on Facebook. Plus automate your blog posts, events, Flickr photos to show up on your profile(s). This makes the company look active and keeps your audience's attention.
Connect with your audience with automated marketing research. For example, with TweetScan you can track keywords on Twitter and create RSS feeds out of that content. So, you can be notified automatically (web or sms) when someone talks about your brand or even a competitors. Also, Google and Yahoo alerts are extremely helpful to track blogs, news and ect.
Create viral content that is easily shareable. The biggest traffic drivers for me have been controversial articles that attract a lot of comments or people to Digg or Stumble.
A custom email signature is an easy way to express that you are using social sites. Having this on your personal or business emails will help increase your fans and friends.Labels: branding, marketing, media, networking, social, traffic
Justin Thorp said... Dude, the idea of making sure your content is shareable is a BIG one for me. It was a big reason why I joined Clearspring.
What is a widget? It's a piece of Web content that was made shareable.
How can a piece of Web content become viral unless it can be shared throughout the community or conversation?
Great post!
Tom Finley said... While I don't disagree that using social networking to elevate the findability of your site, I find this method of seeding links often mentioned in SEO sessions and feel that it is somewhat disingenuous, depending on the scenario.
For example, I'm a web designer and I use Twitter, Virb, LinkedIn, etc. If a byproduct of using those sites is that they link back to my own website, and contain carefully chosen keywords that point back to me, so be it. If I post links to tutorials on Digg or Twitter, and gain traffic and "link cred" so be it.
But if your target demographic is 50+ years old, and you're talking about using Digg and Tumblr, clearly geared toward a younger audience, to seed links to your boomer-oriented retail sites... well now, that's a different story. To me, that's not even a debatable gray area — that's gaming a system for profit, and therefore unethical.
And don't get me wrong, Alex — I like a lot of what you have to say and can appreciate the hard numbers you've been able to use to improve your traffic. I have no doubt you know your stuff.
However, I think there needs to be some clarification... Findability vs. SEO (at least, as SEO is commonly thrown around by questionable individuals) is about truly, organically organizing your content so that the people searching for it can find it, right? It's not about tricking the algorithms, though. It isn't organic if the bulk of your effort goes to spamming the hell out of comment systems and social networks to gain clicks.
I just think the key here, and I hope this is what you're saying Alex, is to run a tight ship by being consistent across the board, and use social networks for their intended purpose, but plan accordingly for a potential added benefit that might result in some extra search engine love.
alexdesigns said... My friend @dstarh also recommended HelloTxt. This service enables you to update your status across all of your social networks and microblogs with a single click. View at
Hellotxt.
alexdesigns said... Also testing Spongecell for event marketing. Create interactive event pages to engage your audience. http://spongecell.com/
alexdesigns said... @Tom Finley - yes Tom, we are on the same page. I am not trying to "trick" the search engines in anyway. Your brand just needs to be findable able when you search facebook or even myspace. This can be done by creating groups around brands or subjects. Being Findable is key.
Look for more follow posts on this topic. I am doing a lot of tests with corporate companies to find ways to improve traffic on the cheap.
March has been a great month for conferences. Early in the month, I attended FOWA and Barcamp Miami, then this past week I attended SXSW and Barcamp Austin. This post is not going to be about the panels or anything I learned at the events. It is going to be about how I improved my networking skills and talked to more people than I ever have. If you go to a lot of conferences and you are very social, than you can probably ignore this, but here was my strategy to get the most out of the events.
Labels: branding, fowa, futureofwebapps, social, southbysouthwest, sxsw
Subscribe to Podcast
Sign up for the 
Subscribe to blog in 
Twitter Updates
LinkedIn Connection
Facebook Profile
Flickr Photos
Lijit Search
0 Comments:
Post a Comment