Why You Need Search Engine and Social Media Optimization Strategies in Your Digital Marketing Plan?

Overview

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is still a key strategy to strengthen online visibility and improve reputation with major search engines (Google, Yahoo, & MSN). But, getting results with SEO strategies alone could be a drawn out process. Because of this, most businesses are adopting SEO in conjunction with one or more Social Media strategies, to improve online visibility in less time. Be sure to consult a professional or do your research, to evaluate whether these strategies are relevant for your business and then put a plan in place to execute these strategies.

History

Few years ago, social media was popular among individuals to interact with family and friends, and stay in touch. It was not the norm for businesses to have fan pages and build their network online. So, businesses allocated their marketing dollars towards paid-search marketing, such as Google Adwords and search engine optimization (SEO) to improve rankings in organic search. As we are aware of the fact that Search Engine Optimization is a long term strategy, for some businesses it took lot longer than others, to achieve rankings in search engines, even after aggressive link building and content marketing strategies. This is not the case anymore, since businesses now have the option of adopting social media strategies in their marketing plan, based on the proven results in the industry relevant to their business.

Current Trends

Now, businesses can allocate resources between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media Optimization(SMO)/Social Media Marketing, and achieve results in less time. By engaging in optimization, it is now easier to adopt marketing Strategies as well.

If you are the hands-off type of business and don't have resources to manage profiles and engage in conversation with fans, SMO is the best option for you. Once you have SMO plan in place and you have resources to manage the profiles on a regular basis and to respond to fan base in a timely manner, you can engage in Marketing activities.

Tips on Optimizing Social Media

If you are the hands-off type of business and don't have resources to manage profiles and engage in conversation with fans, SMO is the best option for you. Optimization takes work, initially. Once you have done it a few times, it becomes a habit. However, if you want to be really consistent with your tasks and be effective, you need to set Campaign Guidelines, to follow:

Optimize your social media profiles, with keywords in about content and ALT-tag for images in image gallery. Some of the popular platforms are LinkedIn, Face book, Twitter, YouTube & Blog.

Design a blue print/schedule for social media activities that need to be performed on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. This is the schedule that needs to be followed by resource Responsible for executing Social Media Plan. If you are going to use in-house resource, be sure to train them for doing the job effectively. You also have the choice of outsourcing the effort.

Syndicate content. Content can be in the form of Text, Video or Images. For example, if you are writing two blog posts a month, when you publish the blog posts, syndicate these posts to multiple platforms & bookmarking sites. There are tools/plug-ins available to automate this process. If you have scheduled one video per month, optimize the video with tags and SEO friendly descriptions in YouTube & syndicate the same video to multiple video parking sites. Content syndication generates many quality links, & contributes to SMO.

Be sure to measure the results of all the activities

Tips on Social Media Marketing

Once you have SMO plan in place and you have resources to manage the profiles on a regular basis and to respond to fan base in a timely manner, you can engage in Social Media Marketing activities.

Before starting your marketing campaign in one or more social media platforms for your business, find out where your target market is active.

Have a social media policy in place for employees who are allowed to participate in online conversation about your brand. This is critical to set a standard for responding to fans & to avoid any negative publicity. If you do get into such situation, be proactive to handle in a timely manner to avoid major damage to your brand.

If you are going to use in-house resource to manage social media profiles for your business, be sure to train them for doing the job effectively. You also have the choice of outsourcing the effort.

In addition to scheduled SMO activities for content syndication, you may also consider ad-hoc tasks to surprise the fan base and create excitement about buying your products and services.

Take advantage of Social media paid campaigns such as Face Book Ads to build brand awareness and build your network.

Be sure to measure the results of all the activities

Benefits

By executing both SEO, SMO & Social Media Marketing effectively, you are leveraging the power of the internet to:

Improve online visibility
Strengthen brand awareness
Build Credibility Online
Build a strong following online
Generate leads by viral marketing
Be the source of information, when consumers are ready

Kriti Web Solutions, LLC has been in business for 21/2 years helping businesses with custom web design and digital marketing strategies to grow their business online. Our strategies include custom web design based on conversion architecture, search engine optimization (SEO), Social Media Optimization (SMO) & other digital marketing techniques.

Kalpana Murthy
Kriti Web Solutions, LLC.
http://www.kritionlinemarketing.com

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Social Media Marketing: 8 Powerful Social Media Strategies That Get Results

Social media marketing is the new way of advertising for both large and small companies. It doesn't matter whether you have 50 clients or five million; your business can benefit from the power of advertising via social media. If you want to improve your advertising and increase your sales, here are eight powerful strategies that will bring you the most benefits.

1. Meet Your Customers Where They Are

One of the greatest benefits of marketing through social media is that your customers are already on the social networks. They have Facebook profiles, follow their Twitter streams and regularly watch videos on YouTube. With this power, you don't have to wait for your customers to come to you or the advertising channels you've used in the past. You can instead target them in an environment they already feel comfortable using. This will make it easier for them to navigate your messages and build relationships with your business.

2. Set the Conversation

When you use social media to connect with your audience, you get the chance to set the conversation. Consumers have more power than ever to research their purchases ahead of time and to find out what others have thought of your products. Many people look online for both positive and negative reviews before trying a new company. Through social media, you can decide what aspects of your product people will focus on. Start conversations and ask people about their favorite features. Begin a dialogue to find out what improvements people would like to see made. When you're open about your company, customers will know they can trust your brand.

3. Build Your Reputation

Though you may already know how important it is to build your rankings on search engines so that you get more traffic, you also need to consider your online reputation. A high-ranking on a search engine doesn't mean much if people don't know whether or not to trust you once they find your page. By using social media to connect with your customers, you develop a sense of social proof that will make new customers feel more comfortable doing business with you.

4. Keep up with the Competition and Make Connections

While most advertising solutions will help you to stay on the same level as your competitors, there are few that allow you to so easily monitor what your competitors are doing. When you're actively engaged in social networks, you can easily look at strategies that other companies use in order to figure out what's working and what's not. Social media marketing also gives you the opportunity to start building relationships with other business owners. You'll be able to make new connections that can easily take your business to new heights.

5. Develop and Sustain Relationships

It's a basic tenet of social media, but still essential: use social media channels to build relationships with your customers. This is perhaps the most profound benefit that social media can offer your business and it will bring you dramatic results. The first step here is to develop relationships with your customers and to provide them with a reason to trust your business. Once you've established a baseline for the type of communications your company will send out, be sure to sustain relationships with continued engagement.

6. Provide as Much Value as Possible

Always provide your customers with as much relevant information as possible. Your focus should be on providing them with useful content before you begin pitching any products or services. Post links through Facebook or Twitter to interesting articles or studies that are relevant to your industry. You can also use a URL shortener like bit.ly to pack more into your tweets.

7. Offer the Right Discounts to the Right People

Be sure you're offering the right types of discounts to your customers. Keep in mind that a coupon or sale that will actually get them in the door to your business or have them checking out your purchase page can be a great investment. While it can certainly be valuable to give people a deal for liking your Facebook page or following you on Twitter, in many cases, you should focus more on customers that are already interested in what you have to offer. A paying customer is more valuable than a fan who might not ever check back.

8. Use Social Media to Your Advantage

Focus on the social media channels that are relevant to your customer base and be sure that you're always keeping your audience in mind. The latest networks may seem like a great opportunity, but if your customers aren't using them, you won't find many followers or new clients. Instead, focus on using the social media marketing tools that your customers know and love so that you engage on a deeper level.

Now that you know these strategies get my free report here: Maximum Impact Social Media Tactics.

Enrique Barba is the principal of Sway New Media where he provides premium SEO services, Social Media Management and Marketing resources.

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Social Media Strategies: Top 10 Do's

Social Media strategy can be a daunting proces...developing the strategy, that is. Here are some key points to to look at when diving into the process and utilizing social media as a marketing tool.

1. What results or outcomes do you want to generate out of social media?

Are you trying to drive new business? Are you selling a book? Are you doing on line webinars? Results/goals you want to achieve - more visibility, tracking others, grow revenue, build community?

2. Who is your target market?

Identify who you want to reach and where are they? What platforms are they using? For example, at first I ignored Facebook for business development, now I spend more time in Facebook than I do in Linkedin.

3. Create effective ways to participate and reciprocate.

If you find an interesting Blog, make comments. If you find an interesting Tweet, make sure to re-tweet giving credit to the original tweeter. These are ways of recognizing and appreciating the contribution of people in your social network.

4. Implementation - Be consistent rather than a blitz.

Though time consuming, Social Media can be integrated into your marketing strategy in a way that it feels natural and easy. For example, a lot of social media activities acan be done 1st thing in the morning and late at night - You can automate some activities using programs SocialOomph to Tweet and blogging can be scheduled.

5. Track and Measure

Periodically, track some aspects of the impact you are making. Social media tools typically have statistics related to the tool, if not there are applications out there that you can add to monitor traffic. Google Analytics for example.

6. Measuring ROI

Think long term. How much is this going to cost you and how much time is it going to take. Make sure benefits exceed costs before you take on a social media strategy. You may see success immediately but like any good marking plan or strategy, it may take some time to see results.

7. Blogging

Many people avoid Blogging because they are not...well "bloggers". Blogging has its own stigma which I must be changed. Remove the work blogging and replace it with article publishing. Using a blog to publish your articles is much more effective than creating PDFs or text pages on your site.

8. Video and other forms of new media (this should be my first point!)

Social media is Multi-Media! Post videos, links, photographs, Pod-casts. They all work in the world of social media. My personal strategy is to use video publishing sites such as YouTube and then embed the media from YouTube into my site or blog. Then I will post updates in my social media communities. This way, they first go to my website to watch the video and YouTube counts it as a view.

9. No time to do this?

If you do not have time for any of this - consider outsourcing this to companies that provide these services. They can guide you more quickly to get the goals you want.

10. If nothing else!

You may still be thinking, "this social media stuff is just not for me". You might be right! It is not for everyone. But, at a minimum, create a LinkedIn profile and keep it current. Consider this your online presence, like a phone book entry. You can do something as simple as upload your address book into LinkedIn and connect with those people you already know. This will take about two hours of your time.

Robert Grossman specializes in designing and creating powerful and effective communications using video, live events, digital media and social media to help companies grow. He is the founder and chief message architect of Focus Creative Group, a full service communications consultancy and production company which serves both large and middle market companies. If you would like more information about how Robert can help your company grow, please visit his website at http://www.focuscreative.com.

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Social Media Strategies - Why Should You Have One?

Well... it's the next big thing, doncha know? It really is. Social media is currently unavoidable and is causing a storm in the marketing world. You can either stay in the dark ages or you can get with the times, and judging by the very real and impressive results some companies are getting, we would recommend the latter.

But there's no point jumping on the bandwagon in a keeping up with the Jones' kind of way. One of the reasons many strategies fail is because a company gets impatient, doesn't take the time to think objectively about what they want to achieve and how they intend on doing it, then quickly lose focus when they don't get the results they expect. Others become a little too obsessed with their Twitter interactions and forget about the actual work... As Buddha suggests, "Take the middle path."

A good social media strategy requires a lot of thought and planning - you need to think about your goals, you need to include your entire company when embarking on this relatively new route to market, you need to prepare content and set aside time to put your aims into practice.

Because we all like a good list of top tips, let's put it like this:

#1 - Social media is a MASSIVE opportunity for building your brand. Massive. MaHOOsive. Imagine a whole network of people orbiting around your business, getting included in the processes and feedback of your ideas, providing free advertising for you through the phenomenon of word-of-mouth, making your company into a familiar brand. Now, it won't always work like this, but the opportunity is there. You can make a dent in your visibility and increase the stretch of your marketing campaign's arms by reaching the largest amount of customers possible through the various platforms of social media - a reach that is incomparable to what you have been doing before.

#2 - Social media has a place for everyone. Where do you belong? Well try out Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Scribd or a gazillion more of the social media platforms out there. Have a good browse, there are many subject specific niche sites which may focus your results more effectively, such as Hugg (ahhh) for environmental issues, Kirsty for fashion and design, Sphinn for search and interactive marketers, Tweako for guides and tutorials and Autospies for, you guessed it, everything automotive. And there is a ton more if you just look - some are not very well publicised, some are not very active, but hey, it's up to you to find the best forum for your content.

#3 - Social media is a cheaper alternative to traditional advertising. It takes narry a penny to set up accounts for email, a blog, or any of the sites listed in #2. It takes man power and man hours to manage, but very little, if anything, to maintain. There are tools to help things work more smoothly and integrate all your different areas of networking which charge for services, but it is possible to run a social media campaign for next to nothing. You are reaching your targeted demographic (and beyond) for the price of your broadband...

#4 - Social media allows you to see what your clients are saying about you. It's no secret that posting certain opinions on social media sites has got people into trouble with bosses, spouses, friends and the law, but a bit of honesty is extremely healthy for marketing. People hang up the minute they realise there's a market researcher calling, yet they'll freely publicise their opinions on products and services online. In fact, most people jump at the chance to give their two pennies' worth. As long as you respond to bad feedback in a productive and professional way, you can use this information to increase your offerings based on cold hard facts, and end up giving your customers exactly what they want.

#5 - Social Media makes us all equal. Social media has a great levelling power. If you're a little local business, trying to branch out into the big bad world of the web - great, you can achieve much wider popularity than just advertising in your home town, doing what you do best, providing great personalised services. If you're a fat cat company, struggling with a public face like a blank wall - great, you can interact with your customers on a personal level, make yourselves accessible and friendly and show the world you're not just a corporate suit. The fact that everyone from your little niece to your doddery granny is getting online and getting involved with social media means that everyone has a voice, and everyone has an opportunity to be friends. Ah, isn't that nice? Now go sell yourself.

Ikroh SEO UK is an award winning ethical internet marketing company, providing all aspects of search engine optimisation, social media marketing, pay per click advertising and more. Visit Ikroh.com for more details.

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Seven Simple Strategies To Increase Your Visibility In The Media

Do you ever notice or even pay attention to how many times your competition appears in the media? Did you ever wonder how or why the same professionals are interviewed as experts in the media? Do you realize the positive impacts that can result from your visibility in the media? Well, if you have noticed and do realize the potential benefits of media attention, what have you done about it?

If you want to increase your visibility in the media, then you must commit to implementing some simple strategies to do so. Your strategic thinking business coach offers the following seven (7) simple strategies to gain media attention and visibility.

1. Make yourself and your company more visible to the media by speaking, writing articles and volunteering.

2. Get your name and the name of your company on the Internet. This will increase the probability of being contacted by the media.

3. Write letters to the editor on topics you know something about and can provide some insights and useful information.

4. Commit to establishing yourself and your company as a media resource, an expert on certain topics, so they will consider contacting you when doing stories on those topics.

5. Write and submit news releases and/or media alerts to the print and broadcast media.

6. Write tips articles in an interview format with you featured as the expert on a topic you know well and submit is as a news release.

7. Create and send a media kit with a biography, photograph, background information on your company, samples of other interview and a news release.

Always remember that it is not the media's job to promote you and your company. However, if you can help journalists by providing valuable content of interest to their audiences, you will get attention. On the other hand, if your approach the media with the idea that they will simply present your advertising message, you will not get the kind of attention you are seeking, Instead, you will continue to see those other professionals and their companies in the news!

Your strategic thinking business coach encourages you to use strategic thinking in the development of your strategic media relations. If you would like to learn more about attracting media attention, gaining positive visibility in the media and how a strategic thinking business coach can facilitate and guide you in that endeavor, please contact Glenn Ebersole today through his website at http://www.businesscoach4u.com or by email at jgecoach@aol.com

Seven Simple Strategies To Increase Your Visibility In The Media

By: J. Glenn Ebersole, Jr., Chief Executive of J. G. Ebersole Associates and The Renaissance Group (TM)

Glenn Ebersole, Jr. is a multi-faceted professional, who is recognized as a visionary, guide and facilitator in the fields of business coaching, marketing, public relations, management, strategic planning and engineering. Glenn is the Founder and Chief Executive of two Lancaster, PA based consulting practices: The Renaissance Group, a creative marketing, public relations, strategic planning and business development consulting firm and J. G. Ebersole Associates, an independent professional engineering, marketing, and management consulting firm. He is a Certified Facilitator and serves as a business coach and a strategic planning facilitator and consultant to a diverse list of clients. Glenn is also the author of a monthly newsletter, ?Glenn?s Guiding Lines ? Thoughts From Your Strategic Thinking Business Coach? and has published more than 250 articles on business.

To find out more about the benefits & rewards of effectively working with a strategic thinking business coach, please contact Glenn Ebersole through his web site at http://www.businesscoach4u.com or jgecoach@aol.com

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CMS - Content Management System Infrastructure Strategies For the Broadcast and Media Industries

Newspapers, television and radio companies are creating content and information at an ever increasing pace.

Traditionally, electronic content has resided on widely disparate technologies, locations and represented only operational transactions. As organizations move operations to online content and establish partnerships, via portals and extranets, with customers and suppliers, "digital content" becomes distributed among many parties.

This presents both opportunities and challenges in building content management systems reflecting the information holdings of the organization.

Content storage and management are key components of an efficient media market. A digital asset manager is required to manage the main repository of an organization's historical content. It would contain the raw online electronic content targeted for expanding distribution to new distribution channels. The critical factor leading to an efficient media market is the ability for online content creators and consumers to perform complex searches and analysis without slowing down the content production operation systems. An online content market is:

Subject-organized - information describing content is stored in a database and is organized by subject so that all the references relating to the same files are linked together;

Time-stamped - changes to the descriptive data in the database are tracked and recorded so that reports can be produced showing changes over time;

Non-volatile - data in the database is never over-written or deleted, once committed, the descriptive data is static, read-only, and retained or archived for future use; and

Integrated - the database would contain information relating to most or all of an organization's production content. Search information would be consistent.

For example, an online content market could be used to search and find all audio, video and text about elections in 2008, or all new medical research papers between December 24th - December 28th 2006.

A core goal of an online market is to integrate content and applications at the data level. Media and data would be extracted from production operations systems, cleansed, transformed, transcoded and placed into the media market according to organizational business rules. Although the notion of creating a centralized content warehouse is conceptually appealing, it is operationally infeasible in many environments. The size and localization of audio and video content may required a distributed, federated approach to be financially and technically practical. Departments within an organization should be encouraged to retain ownership of their content and assume responsibility to share and publish according to well-defined sharing agreements.

Rather than spending a lot of money on a centralized content management system, or CMS, implementing smaller federated local CMS systems, and integrating them organization wide through federated content management sharing software is often a more practical approach.

Federated Media Market

Federated media markets include independent local content file stores within the organization. Local staff members would select and publish video and audio into the system, which would then be integrated into the federated media market model. In most current environments, online content resides in local departmental storage, often implemented using differing closed system commercial products, localized terminology and query languages.

The federated media market approach involves the creation of an information hub containing descriptions of online content of interest to the entire organization, while data of interest to the local department would remain in the local production file stores. The federated market would be used to find internally published content anywhere in the organization. In addition, federated content for new vertical lines of business and distribution channels would be efficiently created by re-purposing accessible media. The federated approach is appealing in that small files containing text descriptions and file location references can reside in the federated content hub, while the large video and audio files can reside in local content stores. A federated media market positions organizations to efficiently enter e-Media markets.

e-Media

e-Media is based on inter-company partnerships among content consumers and content creators. These partnerships are based on the requirement to share online content, and related content information through inter-operable business processes, common data sharing protocols, and open standards such as the extensible markup language. e-Media partnerships require content distribution among specialized software applications for content management, application integration and back-end fulfillment systems such as media distribution and billing.

The dynamic nature of the inter-company relationships and the distributed content contained in existing proprietary systems requires new approaches to storage and cataloging. The federated media market approach allows local staff members to manage locally relevant content while sharing portions of local production content with the federated media market. Specific agreements on how much media and data will be available, the protocols and standards to be used to access and share e-media, the security attributes and distribution permissions of shared media, and quality standards to which these partners must adhere should be carefully defined prior to implementing a federated media market.

A "web service" model to create dynamically configurable customizable data markets is recommended. Media market concepts and tools would include mechanisms to access the databases of these web services to obtain e-Media-specific data regarding those services, e.g., performance metrics, status information, and meta-data which would then be stored in the federated media market. The use of intelligent software agents interacting with hosted media to gather relevant information for the federated media market is recommended. A successful Federated Media Market can become a knowledge repository consisting of low resolution representations of the source media, the source media text information from the local data mart, company wide metadata, workflow patterns, and the company media dictionary.

A federated media market positions organizations to profitably enter e-Media markets.

Joe Tighe
IT Infrastructure Consultant
http://joetighe.wordpress.com

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