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Search Engine Marketing Experts Tote Social Media

I packed my bags and headed out to learn about advanced Pay-Per-Click techniques at SES-NY. While the PPC skills I learned were certainly valuable, nearly every workshop ended with a comment about social media being the future of the industry. I quickly came to realize that there are many more marketing avenues for small businesses that don’t include paid search ads on Google, Yahoo! and MSN. In fact, Twitter and Facebook are now on the forefront of developing some of the strongest marketing channels on the Internet today.

With my curiosity piqued, I joined a session entitled, “Social Media Marketing for Brand Building,” that focused on new e-commerce stores and how to get people to know you exist. Brand building is one of the most important steps in developing a successful online marketing plan. With the Internet filled with people of all ages, ranging from children to senior citizens, expanding your marketing strategies to appeal to such a wide user-base can be very difficult and costly.

Many marketers see social media as being synonymous with socialization – and to help establish brand loyalty, you need to develop a social web. Social webs allow you to have direct insight on your market, products, and shopping experience by having the ability to look at exactly what people are saying about your business. Twitter and Facebook profiles allow you to develop and expand social webs by inviting friends and customers to follow your company in a fun and interactive way. These sites are great for expanding brand awareness by giving your business a personality of its own in even the most competitive markets.

The following strategies were highlighted as top Best Practices for SMO Brand Building:

• Determine your target audience and then incorporate a “tone” that will best influence your customers. Being more personable is the best approach for social networks. When interacting with people online, they don’t want to be subjected to excessive advertising or annoying ploys. People must identify with your brand – the first step to obtaining lifetime customers.

• Starting on the right path is essential. Even choosing a username can have far reaching impact. Always represent yourself and your company in a professional manner. One great approach is to utilize your name along with your brand in the same title for a more personal touch. For example, if you read our eBiz Forums, you may notice my username as Cactus_Brad, which closely associates my name with our company.

• Be sure to engage your audience daily and initiate discussions around your brand. If fans and followers have a question or suggestion, answer it promptly. Keep things interesting, and vary your style to gauge what reactions are sustainable with your customers.

• Most important of all, don’t bombard your customers with useless information. It takes a lot of time and effort to gain somebody’s trust and interest online, but that can disappear in an instant if you come off as pushy or irrelevant.

Bradley Hoppy
Bradleyhoppy@ebizinsider.com

Getting Back to SEO Basics at SES

This year’s Search Engine Strategies conference in New York City was back to basics. While SES-NY included technical workshops exploring advanced SEO tactics, such as understanding how search engines really view duplicate content and the importance of social media, there was a greater emphasis on ensuring site owners have the SEO basics down.

After all, if your foundation is weak, the house will crumble.

There were several sessions about the importance of site content and copy, one of the must-haves in a successful SEO campaign. The speakers at SES highlighted the need to make the content as engaging as possible. Gone are the days when a site owner could simply follow a formula for inserting keywords into copy. Copywriters now need to have the writing skills of a seasoned journalist, and the expertise of an SEO veteran.

Creative copy isn’t just great for search engines, but also for link building. A site will be much more inclined to link to that interesting content on your site rather than a site that lacks personality in its copy. We all know link building can be quite the daunting task, so taking the time to write creative SEO copy can give your site a jump-start on link building.

SEO content’s job doesn’t stop there -
it also can make or break your Social Media Optimization (SMO) campaign. Your SMO campaign needs to be full of personality and portray your brand, and it’s typically the content that does it.
Think of Twitter.com – if you accidentally sound abrasive in a post, you can lose followers and even interest in your brand. The same goes for your Facebook Business Pages; be sure your information is genuine and conveys how unique your brand is.

Search Engine Strategies covered a variety of interesting topics – some a refresher and a welcome update, with other topics providing a fresh perspective or angle to provide our clients with even more SEO success. As Internet Marketing professionals, Brad and I will be adapting to the always evolving digital advertising agency, and conferences like SES help shed light on emerging trends and new avenues to explore for our clients.

Solid Cactus, Inc. has designed or redesigned more than 3,000 e-commerce sites. Solid Cactus is an Inc. 500 company and was named one of the "Best Places to Work in Pennsylvania" in 2006 and 2007.

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