Archive for March, 2010

Mar 12

Social Media Marketing: An Overview

The first aim of any business is to be known amongst their target audience. This is no different for online businesses that strive to shine out amidst billions of sites. Online businesses aim to market their site in several different manners to gain them more customers and business. One such marketing technique is social media marketing.

Social media marketing is a term that defines marketing that is done via social networks, such as online communities, networks, blogs and many other marketing tools to raise awareness amongst their potential clients. These sites are used to publicize, make sales, create connections between the business and target market, and to handle customer service. Some common tools used to perform social media marketing are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Orkut and YouTube.

The three main aspects of social media marketing are firstly, it creates a buzz and attracts readers with catchy and impressive messages. This buzz spreads through the Internet through contact between users who in turn pass it on to their own contacts. Within moments, these messages spread like wild fire.

Another aspect is that it gathers all fans of a brand or company together and allows them to interact with one another, create an identity and communicate their interest for this brand or set of products. It is also based on online conversations that cater around the business, and brings together current and potential customers. Their loyalty would also in turn promote one’s brand and raise awareness amongst other possible clients.

Through either simple networking, or marketing, these social media outlets help websites gain an online presence rapidly. They allow one to reach their target audience regardless of which part of the world they reside in. Another great advantage of social media marketing is, when done well, it could help enhance the search engine friendliness of one’s website.

Effective social media marketing would help generate a good number of quality backlinks to one’s site. These tools help the members of social networks to resend links to one’s websites to other interested viewers, hence adding more backlinks and increasing the popularity of one’s website. This way, their social media marketing campaign achieves two purposes-increasing search engine ranking and online visibility.

In conclusion, social media marketing is effective and natural. It is a great source of web traffic, and achieves great results at a low cost. This form of marketing would work well with any other advertising campaign.

5
comments

Mar 10

Weekly Link Round-Up March 10, 2010

Here is our weekly link round-up for the week. I especially enjoyed the ‘Who Uses Social Media More, Men or Women?’ article because it brings up the point of who uses social media and for what purpose.

A Vibrant Culture of Food Blogging
Real-time updates get turned on for millions of Blogs around the world
Hot SEO Trend for 2010:Getting Back To Basics
SEO without the SEO
Ballmer’s Right: Google Owns Search
Pretty Huge: Twitter ‘plans move into search engine marketing’
Search engine marketing industry ‘must cooperate to protect data’
Who Uses Social Media More, Men or Women?
Social networking not enough for good customer service
The Educationalization of Social Media
Why the social-media aggregator has croaked

1
comments

Mar 07

Free Social Media E-Book Downloads

Here are a few free e-books from HubSpot and Who’s Blogging What that are definitely useful when it comes to learning more about social media marketing and lead generation.  All files are PDFs and will open in a new window.

Social Media Lead Generation

Using LinkedIn for Business (great tips in here)

Who’s Blogging What 2010: Collective Wisdom From Social Media Experts

Does anyone else have any free e-books, webinars, or other resources to share? If so, email The Social Robot using the Contact tab to the left or leave a comment with the URL below.

2
comments

Mar 04

Social Media Optimization: An Overview

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is the brother of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)- they are both attracting customers to their website content, except SMO is attracting visitors to a company’s web site by using its social media pages or profiles on sites like Twitter and Facebook. In addition, creating a SMO-friendly website means making social media a core component of how users interact with content.

There are several different things companies can add to their site to make it SMO, thus increasing traffic and building links. Some of these include:

  1. Adding RSS feeds and making subscribing to RSS feeds by email easy (like the Feedburner Subscription box on the sidebar of The Social Robot.)
  2. Adding social media share buttons (like those found on addany.com or sharethis.com)
  3. Plugins and components that allow users to rate and comment on posts and content
  4. Widgets that pull in company tweets or facebook updates
  5. Easy customer engagement, like the ability to upload videos with their company feedback and thoughts.

In addition, there are also some social media optimization tactics that work as a ‘pull’ method to get users to come to the site.

  1. Guest blogging on other’s blogs with a link back to company website
  2. Commenting on relevant blog articles and including website address in the URL or comment itself (but only if it is topically relevant- otherwise would be spamming)
  3. Answering questions related to company’s industry on LinkedIn Answers or Yahoo! Answers, in addition to forums and message boards. Include link to company website in signature, if applicable and allowed.

Here’s some great posts on social media optimization from around the internet:

13 rules of SMO
social-media-optimization.com
16 rules for SMO revisited
The beginners guide to SMO

2
comments

Mar 02

Weekly Link Round-Up March 2, 2010

The web’s best stories on SEM, Social Media, and more, for the first week in March.

Build your integrated marketing team
Engaging a web partner- before the “I Do’s”
Microsoft and Yahoo deal cleared
Carnival, Travelocity say SEO and social media behind traffic surge
SEO recommendations don’t implement themselves!
5 ways to maximize social media marketing productivity in the workplace
Do’s and dont’s of social media marketing
Time for companies to embrace social media marketing

0
comments