What is Social Media?
It used to be that the only reliable way to find information online was to use a search engine.
However, with the advent of what we call Web 2.0 (interactive, dynamic websites that promote or operate as social networks), people can now easily find information and websites that other human beings recommend.
The most recent instance of this is social bookmarking. Websites like Del.icio.us, Digg, and Furl allow users to share their personal favourites (bookmarks) with others. Users tag each bookmarked website with the keywords they feel are most applicable.
Now, instead of using a search engine to find information, people can search tags that will display all websites bookmarked with that specific tag. This amounts to a human referral or vote for the site and its relevance to the subject being searched.
Other versions of social media include blogging social networks – primarily Technorati.com. Technorati indexes blogs based on the amount of incoming links those blogs have, as well as the tags associated with their posts.
But the 3 most popular social media sites are of course Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Though these social giants enjoy millions of unique visitors every month, few businesses or website owners have thought to penetrate these incredible resources.
How Will Social Media Help My Site Traffic Grow?
With traffic to social media sites climbing daily, experts predict social media is starting to eclipse traffic from the major search engines. Google publicly announced in early 2010 that they consider Facebook a 'legitimate threat' to there business!
So if your company is not present on any of the major social networks, you're missing out on the easiest, fastest way to access the bulk of today's internet users.
How Do I Get Involved in Social Media?
Working with social sites is similar to working with the media. Give them a good enough story, secret, tip, or resource that they can sink their teeth into and you’ll have an army of talkers spreading the word about you and your business.
And this translates into referrals, which convert into sales on an average of 667% better than cold leads (search engine results). So even if you reach less people through social networking, your conversions will be far higher.
We target various social networks through a variety of methods:
Article or Blog Promotion
We manage several blogs for our various clients (as well as article pages) that contain posts written purely to capture the imagination and interest of our client’s target market.
For instance, if you sell pet beds, gifts, and items, we will develop a series of blog posts or articles that discuss a controversial or “hot off the press” topic that pet lovers either find highly valuable as an information resource, or highly intriguing or emotionally stimulating. We will then promote it to various social bookmarking and blogging networks, as well as popular bloggers – who will then circulate the story and generate traffic back to your website.
Social Promotion
Particularly effective for clients who target teens, young adults, musicians, or other highly active social groups, we implement social promotion campaigns on networks like FaceBook, Twitter, and CraigsList to spread the word about your business. Even if your business does not target the “Facebook crowd,” we can almost always devise a creative campaign to get the net buzzing.
How Does Social Media Work With SEO?
As more and more internet users begin to use tags to find information (a tag is a keyword that a human associated with a website, vs. a keyword that a search engine attributes to a website), Search Marketing professionals cannot ignore the growing dominance of social media.
However, we view the partnership between social media and search engines as an excellent and balanced marriage. Sure, social media gets you in front of people who no longer use search engines in lieu of finding their information through referrals or bookmarks/tags.
But the added, and perhaps more exciting bonus, is that while you grow in popularity with social media, your search rankings will continue to increase as a result!
Your popularity signals Google that you are an authority in your market according to your human audience.
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