Social Media Promotion

Everyone in SEO is banging on about how social media is so great for SEO. We talk about it often on SEO the Game but have not really discussed it in detail. What is the social media and what are the opportunities out there for those dipping their SEO toes in the water?

What is Social Media?

You might be forgiven for thinking it was any site with a domain name that replaces ‘er’ with just r at the end of the domain (Flickr, Frappr, Scanr) or it was any site with a stupid nonsense word (Squidoo, Ning).  However, I would say that its principle commonality  and what distinguishes it from websites or blogs, is that they attempt to generate traffic by user created content. It evolved when webmasters realised that it is really difficult to keep coming up with new ideas and write original content that will keep visitors returning. The solution is to get your users to find links to content or generate it by talking among themselves. This will provide a constant stream of content that people will keep coming back for.

Within this realm, there is a great deal of diversity:

• Social bookmarks – del.icio.us
• Forums
• Blog Comments
• Friend Aggregators – Facebook, FriendsReunited, MySpace
• Voting Sites – Digg, Redit, Sphinn, Mixx
• Non-Instant Messaging Services (NIMS) – Twitter,
• Professional Networking – LinkedIn
• Social networks and even a social network of social networks – Ning

These categories do not have strong boundaries so some social media site cannot be easily pigeon-holed.  SEOMoz has a directory of social media sites.

How is it Useful?

The main idea of social networks is to get your message to certain groups of people that are interested in hearing what you have to say. Social media is another way to generate targeted traffic. Although for some, the great hope of people when they use social media is the viral explosion.

Social media has the potential to start a chain reaction, with content acting like fissile U-235 and recommendations as slow neutrons. Pretty soon you could have an explosion of traffic. However,  if you don’t have weapons-grade content it will just fizzle out.

Social media can be useful in reputation management and customer services as a platform to listen to what your customers are saying about your products.  This is particularly true of NIMS services like Twitter.

Promoting Your Content?

The best way is to start is by experimenting with a few social media sites. Most require that you sign-up with a user account. Once registered, read what is already there and get a feel for what type of users frequent the site. Comment and vote on items which you genuinely think are worthy. Try participate in the spirit of the service.

The old ways of get as many people to your site are over.  While it is important to generate traffic we want that traffic to be targeted so that, if it is selling a product or service, it will convert into a sale. Choosing the right social media source is very important. For SEOs, one of the most important social networking sites is Sphinn. It is about marketing and search engine optimisation related topics so it is perfectly targeted to promoting SEO the Game.

Obviously, for something mundane such as a garden furniture this could be a problem, it is not going to appeal much to the people of  Instructables for example unless it was sun-lounger with a 802.11 g wi-fi connection. However, such things can be promoted by targeting a gardening Facebook groups.

If you run a blog,  add social bookmarks to each post, Twitter your blog posts. Allow people to comment without registering. Post your best content on voting sites. Make your customers aware of your social media endeavours. Use every method at your disposal be it blogs, e-mail and non-web based means through newsletters even receipts.

It is not easy to make social media work.  Just creating a Facebook account and making all your employees sign up to is not going to achieve anything. To make it work need a lots of repeated effort. Hitting all the social media sites with spammy links to products hoping that people will buy. In most cases it will just make you unpopular or get your account banned.

Many people believe that as social media will overtake search in importance. I don’t believe this is true,  because search is still a more immediate way to find specific information, but I think that social media will become another way to reinforce the  link  between customers and another tool in the SEO toolbox to increase awareness for your website. It will also become more interlinked with other social media sites creating social media networks.