SOCIAL MEDIA: The Tailwind for SEO & Lead Generation

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1 SOCIAL MEDIA: The Tailwind for SEO & Lead Generation

2 2 INTRODUCTION How can you translate followers into dollars and social media engagement into sales and deals? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy and social media marketing (SMM) go hand-in-hand. By leveraging your company s presence on Facebook and Twitter, you now have more opportunities to increase ranking and generate leads. Digital marketers have struggled in the quest to measure and determine social media s worth and its impact on their business. The rise of social media activity has influenced search engine ranking algorithms to factor in social elements for relevant search results. Who knew that Facebook and Twitter could so powerfully influence SEO and lead growth? Here, we will guide you through tips and best practices for effective social media optimization that will make an impact on your bottom line and result in sales. Discover how to: Increase the level of audience interaction Improve the quality of social media leads Measure return on engagement (ROE) Leverage social media to improve SEO performance

3 3 GROW YOUR BRAND WITH SOCIAL MEDIA IMPROVE YOUR ONLINE VISIBILITY Start a conversation It all starts with a conversation. Instead of selling to your prospects, engage them in dialogue. A study by Chadwick Martin Bailey and imoderate Research Technologies revealed that consumers are 79% more likely to recommend their Twitter follows to a friend and 60% more likely to share on Facebook with their friends. Identifying your ROE and the activities that lead to it is critical to the long-term success of your social media strategy. Want to supercharge your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy and deepen your social media engagement? Let us show you how to integrate effective brand messaging, meaningful engagements, campaign monitoring, and community management, and truly gain sales traction with social media campaigns. Formulate a marketing effectiveness strategy Between Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, about 5 billion search queries are processed on a daily basis. Is your business showing up on the first page? SEO is all about getting your business in front of prospects when they are searching for your product or solution before your competitors do. When it comes to social media, the same goals apply. The opportunity to spread brand messaging and encourage communities to respond to your offers is powerful. Marketing professionals are aware of the strong influence of SMM, but are not always certain how to get started. Creating successful social media campaigns is more than creating a Facebook Fan Page or a Twitter account. So how should you initiate a social media campaign that will also impact your SEO and drive more traffic to your site?

4 4 First, evaluate your current business challenges and online goals. How do you increase visibility, build trust and authority, and attract customers? Determine and map out a tactical plan to promote and position your brand while capitalizing on key competitive advantages. To do this, start by identifying the keywords, customer terminology, and branding elements that best match your products and set it apart from your competition. To complement your SEO initiatives in driving a rise in ranking, establish a process-oriented strategy to link social media optimization (SMO) tactics to your SEO program. This involves cross promoting your tweets, Likes, and Shares across your social media platforms. As you participate in dedicated customer service, real-time conversation, proactive conversation monitoring, and brand exposure management, you will build your SEO strength at the same time. Map out your plan Your business needs to cultivate a loyal and engaged online community. To boost your SEO with social media, be sure to navigate through these steps at the start of your SMM campaign plan: 1. Diagram: Lay out the social networks where you will be active. 2. Test: Test different types of campaigns to see which work best with your audience and your specific goals (ex: contest, giveaway, quiz, survey, or viral brand awareness campaign). 3. Strategize: Strategize the content you will promote across your networks and how you will deliver it. 4. Implement: Place your strategy in action, launch your campaign, and grow your community by continually collecting new quality members. 5. Monitor: Track your followers, fans, member growth, and engagements on a monthly basis. 6. Measure: Evaluate your traction by measuring your ROE across periods of time. 7. Optimize: Constantly optimize your program by developing fresh content and strategically scheduling posts and tweets to encourage more user interaction.

5 5 Understand your customer base Where are your customers spending their time? What are their interests? What do they search for? If you are asking these questions as you determine the best way to approach your social media audience, you are on the right track. Before you begin a campaign, you need to know exactly where your target demographic is hanging out and where interests them. This will allow you to present tailored ads and personalized offers which will encourage a higher rate of user interaction and activity through your conversion funnel. The goal is for your community not to just Like your brand, but to love it. Captivate an active audience Once you have pinpointed where your audience groups gather and what they are searching for, initiate the following tactics to strengthen your campaign s effectiveness: 1. Audience profile: Determine the audience profile that fits the target demographic for your product or service. 2. Outreach: Connect with your visitors as a thought-leader to establish your community. 3. Value Prop: Attract customers who are interested in your brand and what you have to offer. 4. Messaging: Engage your audience with incentive-driven, interactive messaging that will lead them to follow your call-to-action. 5. Engagement plan: Cultivate a sustainable community through meaningful and fun conversation. 6. Call-to-action: Drive your loyal fans and followers to your website with clear conversion goals. 7. Budget: Measure your social media ROI with monitoring tools that provide information on clicks, engagement, traffic, and conversions.

6 6 INTEGRATE SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY INTO YOUR SEO Boost site traffic A recent study conducted by inblurbs surveyed 180 businesses and discovered that 67% of the B2C and 41% of the B2B companies have been able to win new customers through Facebook. SEO and social media work hand-in-hand when it comes to generating revenue dollars and increasing brand awareness. Be sure to add share buttons to your website, especially next to fresh content that you want your audience to pass along to their friends and colleagues. When you write a new blog post, integrate keywords naturally into your writing to catch the attention of the search engines. Don t forget to also cross-promote your blog content on your Facebook Page and on Twitter. A blog isn t useful if it isn t actively shared. This tactic will give you more touch points with your community and boost your ranking on the SERP as people respond, reply, share and retweet your content. As you optimize your social media networks with targeted messaging and a customer-service-oriented positioning, you will see the following impact on your SEO: 1. Rise in website goal completions 2. Boost in the number of Likes 3. Increase in retweet/reply/feedback rates 4. Improvement in tweet/retweet sentiment Engage with keyword-rich, fresh content People like new content and so do search engines. To effectively engage your audience and promote sharing, you need to give them something to talk about. Whether you are a B2B or B2C, you need to monitor the share power of your brand messaging and content distribution on the social playing field.

7 7 To get social, be social Make it fun and share what s new! Bring attention to your brand and your product by making experiences like online shopping more personalized and socially connected. If you are a B2B, try experimenting with a contest to stimulate competition and gather user-generated content that is sharable. It may be relevant to create a quiz that relates to your webinar material, encouraging participation that boosts traffic and registration numbers on your site. If you conduct a survey, be sure to promote it on your social networks. Tweet about it, send it to your Facebook Fan group, share it on LinkedIn. Not only will you gather more participants, but you will create buzz and anticipation among your audience to check out the results once your survey is completed. Search engines Like social conversations Who knew that your tweets and Facebook posts could help you rise in organic ranking on Google? By managing your engagement impact, you are also managing your SEO strength. Use keyword-rich content in your Twitter profile bio and in your hashtags, which will allow your tweets to display for those terms in the Twitter search results. Additionally, if you use keywords in your daily tweets, search engines will recognize them, include them on the search results page (SERP) and drive traffic to your site. The belief that no-follow tags do not impact search engine results is in the past. No-follow tags do impact results and your social media presence is now taken into consideration by Google spiders when crawling your site. If you are a B2C, try out a coupon campaign on Facebook. This is a great way to spread brand awareness, stimulate conversation around a new product or offering, and generate sales. From selling your product directly on Facebook to booking appointments online, you can maximize your ROI and ROE in different ways that are fresh and engaging. With social media, both B2C and B2B companies can influence their consumer base with unique offerings that will transform into real revenue and sales-ready leads. Integrate effective brand messaging with incentivedriven engagements, campaign monitoring, and community management. With dedication and a well-thought out strategy, you will see the impact of social media on your business revenue and online visibility.

8 8 TRACK AND MEASURE YOUR ROE Monitor your traffic on Google Analytics Utilize your Google Analytics account to monitor your traffic from social media. You can create a custom filter that captures referrals from your social media sites. You can measure the % of new visits, average time on site and page views to determine the strength of your engagement level. New visit numbers can be analyzed against other traffic sources that feed to your site. This is a good place to start evaluating where you need to improve and dedicate more focus in your social media efforts to draw more qualified traffic to your homepage and relevant landing pages. Measure your buzz on Facebook Take advantage of creating and testing different types of social media campaigns to influence your fan base and encourage user interaction. With social media tools, you can effectively measure the performance of individual campaigns and monitor lead growth. Try out user contests, coupons, and giveaways to encourage participation. Buzz is tied closely to viral campaigns that drive engagement and promote sharing among your community members. Even if you are a B2B, you can still greatly benefit from social initiatives that connect your site to social communities. At the beginning of 2011, there were over 600 million Facebook users. Now, Facebook is nearing the 1 billion mark. A large segment of your audience is spending time in social networks. It is your job to make your business stand out in the face of competition where your customers are hanging out and gain mind share. Grow your followship on Twitter Take a look at your competitors followers. A good strategy to build your followship is to follow in order to prompt a follow back. 1 out of every 4 people you follow is likely to follow you. Therefore, it is probable that if a customer or prospect is following one of your competitors, that person will come to follow you as well. The goal is to continue to build up your following each day.

9 9 A consistent tweeting frequency is recommended. Typically sending out a tweet 2-5 times a day is optimal. With free scheduling tools like Seesmic and CoTweet, you can schedule tweets in advance and strategically space out your pings in order to reach your followers at different times of the day. Try to vary your tweet content to include 2 tweets about company news, 1 tweet that is thought-leadership oriented, and 2 that are industry-related. Your tweets that reflect current developments or events in the industry can be retweets of other thought-leaders in the field. This demonstrates your credibility and shows that you are staying on top of the latest industry developments and trends. People like this and will follow you if they see your activity each day is relevant to their interests. TweetStats is a helpful measurement tool that allows you to track your follower growth on a daily, monthly, or yearly basis. You can track your tweet numbers, retweets, and mentions across particular spans of time. You may already use bit.ly as a URL shortener, but it is also helpful to measure the volume of clicks that each of your tweets attracts. This serves as a useful metric to determine the type of content that is engaging the most followers. This will allow you to form a tighter strategy for reaching these customers, improving your brand exposure, exerting your role as a thought-leader in the field, and promoting conversion activity on your site. CONCLUSION Keep sharing and connecting In social media, your ROI is your ROE. The advertising landscape is complex, constantly changing, and always buzzing with new trends. To keep up with the fast pace of digital marketing, it is imperative to stay active in social media as an extension of your search optimization and brand messaging strategy. Monitor meaningful engagement with your community and move your followers into action. You will be on your way once you establish a powerful voice that reflects your brand and your value proposition in the online marketplace. If you would like Webmarketing123 to complete a customized SEO or Social Media site analysis for your business, please visit our site at today to sign up. You can also contact us at or webmarketing123.com and we will be pleased to help.