GUIDE TO SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING V GNOSIS ARTS MULTIMEDIA COMMUNICATIONS LLC

Transcription

1 GUIDE TO SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING V GNOSIS ARTS MULTIMEDIA COMMUNICATIONS LLC

2 Introduction This is the second edition of our Guide to Social Media Optimization. The first volume was published in early As you know, this was prior to what we call the "Twitter Revolution". The advent of Twitter - coupled with significant changes in search engine algorithms, the creation of Microsoft's Bing search engine, and the merger between Yahoo and MSN search technology - has, in effect, made many of the principles of v.1 obsolete. Therefore, our SEO team felt it was necessary to produce this second volume to reflect the changing landscape of social media marketing. In light of these changes, this guide will thus focus on only three social media sites: LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. We feel that these three social media sites are not only the most popular, but that they are the most effective in terms of social media marketing. This guide shows precisely how we utilize these three sites to generate business leads, additional traffic and even SERP improvement. Additionally, we show you how to start a low-cost marketing campaign using these sites and third-party and internal applications that use the APIs of these sites.

3 LinkedIn There are three main ways to use LinkedIn for Internet marketing/seo purposes: 1. To create do-follow links with keyword-specific anchor text 2. To use the site's internal site search and LinkedIn Answers to discover business leads/prospects 3. Using the Outlook folder export command, contacts can easily and quickly be uploaded into your LinkedIn contacts Creating do-follow links with keyword specific anchor text Your LinkedIn profile contains a not-so well-known feature. In the section where you enter your website links, many people do not realize that you can create a link with keyword phrase anchor text. What's even better: these links are still dofollowed, meaning that they still pass PageRank of your profile page to the site the profile page links. Look at this example from my personal LinkedIn profile: Notice the links in the "Websites" section. Each of these links contains keyword phrases as the anchor text. And these links are dofollowed. Each of these terms is a keyword phrase that we are always optimizing for. These LinkedIn links, therefore, help to improve our SERPs for these terms. Also notice the description underneath my name. This description operates as a sort of TITLE tag for the page. We know this because the page ranks highly in

4 Google for the phrases "seo consultant in central nj" "internet marketing for nj businesses" Make sure to take advantage of these free, easy anchor links in your LinkedIn profile. Using LinkedIn's Internal Site Search and LinkedIn Answers to Locate Leads One principle of social media marketing is to treat social media sites like the major search engines. LInkedIn, for example, has many internal site search databases that can be approached in the same way an SEO approaches organic search engine optimization. One of these search databases is the Answers database. With LinkedIn Answers, members submit questions about virtually any topic they want. Other members of the community then can go to the question and post an answer. We have used the Answers database to locate LinkedIn members needing products and/or services matching our own. Look at the following example: By typing in the keyword "looking for seo firm," we can search the Answers database to find LinkedIn members who asked a question relating to this subject. So, one strategy is to think about the keywords that your website targets, or to think about keywords relating to your products and services. Search for these keywords in LinkedIn's Answers database. This will enable you to pinpoint individuals who may be interested in your products and services. This is sometimes an excellent form of prospecting and lead generation. Using the Outlook Folder Export and the LInkedIn Outlook Import Application If you have experience using Microsoft Outlook, then you may know that Outlook has an export function. All s within a particular folder can be exported as an Excel.csv or.xls file. LinkedIn enables you to upload this.csv/.xls file into LinkedIn. It then adds these Outlook s into your LinkedIn contacts:

5 The URL of the LinkedIn-Outlook uploader is uploadcontacts?displayuploadcontacts=&context=2&trk=inv_other&goback=.cnt_false_0_0 To upload the.csv/.xls file, simply click the "Browse" button and locate the file to be uploaded. Then click the "Upload Contacts File." The contact s will be uploaded to LinkedIn, and you will have the option of adding them to your preexisting contact list. This is beneficial for marketing because it means that any contact you make through Outlook can potentially become a business prospect in LinkedIn. LinkedIn also allows you to up to 50 people in your contact list at a time. The point is: social media marketing requires thinking about sites like LinkedIn in unique, novel ways. Don't just see them as sites for social interaction; begin to think about these sites in the way that pro SEOs do.

6 Facebook In Facebook, we have discovered three distinct ways to aid in a business' or website's marketing efforts: 1. Developing applications that can garner a large following of Facebook fans 2. Creating a business page and embedding the "become a fan" widget into your website or blog 3. Purchasing the "Become A Fan" ads Developing a Facebook Application Facebook apps are built using the Facebook Developer Platform ( These apps require a special coding language used only by Facebook called FBML - Facebook Markup Language. It is a type of XML designed specifically for the construction of Facebook apps. Now, most marketers (myself included) do not know XML coding 9nor care to). Without knowing XML, it is virtually impossible to create a Facebook application. Moreover, there aren't many third-party apps that build FB apps for you. However, we have found one. It's called Zembly, and is located at We have used the Zembly CMS to build a Facebook application. Once your application gets 5 regular users, you can then submit it to the Facebook App Directory, where it can be searched for by the mass of Facebook users. Now, in terms of marketing, an application is valuable because all the regular users can be ed updates on the application (or anything else the developer wants to update them on). These app fans therefore make excellent candidates for future marketing endeavors. The downside of the Facebook app: even utilizing the Zembly CMS it can be difficult to build a decent application. Building a quality application really requires a significant time investment. Your marketing department must decide whether such a time investment will produce enough of a Return on Investment (ROI). Here is an example of a simple poll application we built using Zembly:

7 The app is called "smopolls social media optimization polls." It is basically a onequestion poll on individuals' use of social media sites. (You can find the app at Anytime we want to publish a new poll question, we can just hop onto Zembly and edit the app. Then, we publish to Facebook via the API key. The poll question is then updated on the profiles of all users who have our app embedded into their personal Facebook profiles. Creating A Facebook Fan Page for Your Business A simpler approach is to create a page for your business, website or brand. (This is separate from your main profile page.) Once the page is created, you can then add the "Become A Fan" widget on your website or blog. The widget is basically an advertisement of your Facebook page, and includes the names and pictures of your fans, thus encouraging others to become fans as well:

8 An illustration of our Facebook fan page widget Just like the Facebook app, you can send updates, event invitations and general notifications to all your fans - another avenue for marketing. Facebook Engagement Ads: Become A Fan There is another avenue that Facebook provides for marketing, and that it its "become a fan" engagements ads. If you are a regular Facebook user, you've probably seen these ads. "So and so is a fan of X. Become a fan yourself." The uniqueness of these ads is that they are not ads selling a product or service directly. Rather, they are ads selling an idea - an idea that hopes to gain followers

9 who can then be marketed to later on. By clicking on the "Become A Fan" link, or by clicking on the Thumbs Up icon, the viewer automatically becomes a fan of the subject of the ad, in this case, The Texas Music Scene. This may be a Facebook page, a product or a service. As a fan of The Texas Music Scene, whenever the organization sends updates, you will receive them. The downside of engagement ads is the price. They can get expensive, sometimes rising to between $2-$3 per click, considerably more expensive than the typical, well-managed AdWords PPC campaign.

10 Twitter The newest of the three social media sites, Twitter's marketing value lies in two main areas: 1. As an avenue of marketing 2. Its ability to generate followers targeted to your niche automatically and without any significant time investment. Twitter's Use in Marketing Properly speaking, Twitter - by itself - isn't of much benefit at all. It is the staggering plethora of third-party apps that Twitter has spawned that really give Twitter its power. One such third-party app is called Twtgroups ( With Twgroups, you can import all your Twitter followers, collect their addresses, and then send out a mass to all of them at once: Twgroups also allows you to separate your followers into relevant categories for more targeted campaigns. Using Twitter to Generate Targeted Prospects Perhaps the most powerful use of Twitter, we've found, is in generating targeted prospects. What makes Twitter so powerful at this is the fact that generating these prospects can be done virtually on automatic pilot. It requires so little time, effort or attention to do. Again, what makes this possible is a third-party Twitter app called RSS2Twitter

11 ( That this app is awesome is an understatement. It allows you to feed any RSS feed into your Twitter status update. Thus, you can update content for your Twitter feed without sending a single Tweet manually. Even better: RSS2Twitter enables you to preface your Tweets with words and characters of your choosing. Why is this so awesome? Because the secret of generating a targeted Twitter following on autopilot lies in the use of that itty bitty character we now know as the Twitter hashtag. The RSS2Twitter CPanel What is the Hashtag - and Why Is It So Important? The Twitter hashtag is the pound (#) symbol. It is basically Twitter's version of a tag. As you are probably aware, tags are used in blog platforms, other social media sites like del.icio.us and Furl, on wikis and other places. A tag is a way to classify the content of the post with relevant keywords. Again, the hashtag isn't really all that powerful in itself. It derives its power from the third-party apps that utilize it. For example, one such app is hashtags.org. This site is a gigantic mashup of all the Twitter tags used on Twitter. It also reports popular tag trends over a day, week and month's period.

12 Hashtags.Org - A Twitter Hashtag Database The second type of third-party Twitter app that utilizes the hashtag are auto-follow apps. Examples of these apps include Twollow, FeaturedUsers, and Tweetlater. These apps enabletwitterers to automatically follow people whose Tweets include particular hashtags (or keywords). Twollow, an Auto-Following Twitter App

13 So, using all these tools together, we have the ingredients to produce keyword-relevant content, generate targeted prospects and market to those prospects via . Hence, Twitter as an extension to marketing. Furthermore, we can do all this with practically no manual labor! You can't beat that with a stick.

14 Conclusion We hope we've demonstrated in practical terms how to utilize the three most popular social media sites as Internet marketing tools. If your firm needs social media marketing consultation, feel free to contact us at Gnosis Arts Multimedia Communications LLC 22 Ray Court Bedminster NJ