Social Media can Improve your SEO & SEM

A common question that decision makers ask when referring to a social marketing strategy is a very simple and appropriate one: Why?

Although we are starting to see more and more concrete examples around the ROI of social programs, it has still been a struggle for people to quantify the value of a good social media strategy for brands. Companies are used to seeing the value out of a good SEO or SEM program, because of the direct data analysis that corresponds with them. So here are few reasons of how a good social marketing strategy can affect these more understood initiatives.

Search is becoming social. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is changing and will have to change around the social graph. The reason for this is that the goal of Search Engines is to deliver the best result based on any given search. SEO strategy plays off of this by structuring & optimizing your content and links so that the SE's can read it. However, content is changing from static content to real-time social content. So SEO will have to change around social because the Search Engines are having to change around social media. Bing recently announced a deal with Facebook, where in the Search Results you will see Facebook likes from your friends related to the results. You can imagine the benefit to those companies that have a large or targeted fan base. Google has been testing other social elements, including "tweets" within the results based on keywords. The web is being rebuilt around people and dynamic real-time content, and therefore the strategies for your brand must adapt as well.

As search becomes social, naturally Search Engine Marketing (SEM) will be affected. Aside from the obvious benefits if SEM platforms start adding social elements within the ads or delivery context, there are other benefits. "Trust Elements" such as Badges, Testimonials and Word-of-mouth conversation are some of the most important factors when building quality landing/conversion pages, therefore they can have a significant impact when measuring SEM conversion rates. As you pay to drive clicks to a certain landing page, showing that you are engaging with current customers via social channels can be a statistically significant influence on your conversion rates for this traffic. In past SEM campaigns I have run, I saw conversion rates jump by over 30% by clearly showing we were actively social, and allowing clients to read the natural conversation taking place around our brand and products. We also included 'twitter testimonials' on our conversion pages with the twitter handles so people could validate the claims, because the conversations are live on the web.

So not only will social marketing add tremendous value independently of Search Engines, it can also add measurable value to the current programs you have in place within the more understood "search" environment.

Busy Seattle Technology Marketing Week

If you're in technology marketing and advertising, this is going to be a busy week.

Tuesday: Social Media Club October Event "Building Ambassadors Using Social Media" at The Canal in Ballard, 5300 34th Ave NW, Seattle, WA 98107 (6-9pm)

Wednesday: TechFlash Meetup at Spitfire Grill, 2219 4th Avenue Seattle, WA (5-8pm)

Thursday: NWIAG.com October Event at Havana's Social, 1010 E. Pike St, Seattle, WA 98122. (5-9pm)

See you all there.

The sFund and Space Travel

This week's Headlines in Social Media

The big story of the week is the announcement that Kleiner Perkins, Amazon, Zynga, Facebook, Comcast and others are all betting on Social.

"Social is just getting started and the opportunities are vast. As in the early days of the Internet, the race is on. Today every business, organization, and entrepreneur should have a social strategy." -KPCB Partner Bing Gordon

Together these giants launched the 'sFund' this week, which will be a $250 million dollar fund dedicated to funding entrepreneurs and companies delivery social applications and advancing the social web. Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg says:

"The Web is being rebuilt around people"

It is great to see that companies of this magnitude and are combing their resources to drive further innovation in the "social web". One of the first investments for the fund is "Cafebots" which is in stealth but is being dubbed as a "Friend Relationship Management" service with the goal of helping users make better use of their social graphs. This gives an idea of the next generation of companies that will add value to the social web.

Foursquare

An Astronaut checked into Foursquare from outer Space today which is a first in the realm of outer space social media. It kicks off a partnership between NASA and Foursquare helping to promote other NASA venues that the rest of us may be able to check-in to.

This Week's Headlines in Social Media

According to a recent study, Social Media is now more popular than email on mobile devices (based on the amount of hours spent daily). The article from Mashable also goes on to state that social media is more popular in rapid growth markets worldwide, and takes up more of their time on PC's than email does. Overall it is just another reminder of the tremendous growth of Social Media worldwide.

Facebook & Bing Partnership

Facebook and Bing have announced a new partnership to integrate "like" data and profile search to Bing. This article from Mashable does a good job of describing some of the advantages and unique ways that these companies are leading the innovation in social search.

Measuring Social Media - Eventbrite's Internal Case Study:

For Eventbrite Social Media = Real Dollars. When someone shares something on their event ticketing site they have been able to break it down to real dollar values. They also go on to state: "The hyper-relevancy of the social graph breeds deeper engagement, greater sales and stickier audiences."

So what is the actual value of the various platforms? According to Eventbrite:

"Our most recent data shows that over the past 12 weeks, one share on Facebook equals $2.52, a share on Twitter equals $0.43, a share on LinkedIn equals $0.90, and a share through our ”email friends” application equals $2.34. On an aggregate level across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and our email share tool, each share equals $1.78 in ticket sales. We’re seeing this number improve every week with the most recent four-week average equaling $1.87."

Here is what the social commerce cycle looks like for them:

Event ticketing made social through Eventbrite

Keep in mind events are inherently social and are directly engaging their users to an ecommerce transaction, however statistics like these are great to see the value that social media can bring. Eventbrite also states that Facebook has surpassed Google as their #1 site for referring traffic, and that one share on Facebook brings on average of 11 visits back to Eventbrite.

Learn how Eventbrite went about quantifying their data and building this social commerce case study.

Weekly Social Recap

Facebook

This week Facebook unveiled "Groups" which gives users a place to participate in various activities such as document sharing, chat, photo-tagging and email lists with a select group of friends. Other than the name this is very different than their previous "group" functionality. This was built internally by Facebook with an effort to mirror "real-world" groups, allowing users to control the distribution of their messages, and build them around multiple contexts. Zuckerberg promises, something “so simple that everyone on the site will want to interact with it.”

Here is good demo & overview from Mashables' Ben Parr:


Twitter

For many of us Twitter's new User Interface or User Experience (UI / UX) was implemented this week. Twitter has been busy rolling out it's redesign over the last few weeks. The redesign integrates multimedia into the stream on "Twitter.com" taking elements from many of the third-party applications available. So far the response has been positive, and likely the redesign will help create stickiness on the "Twitter.com" website versus sending their users elsewhere across the web. This also opens a new world of revenue and advertising opportunities for them.


Interesting uses of Social Media

Staples

Staples is a great example of a big brand using their social media channels in creative ways. They use their Twitter Page for community updates, customer support, and overall feedback. With several writers under various tags (^MO) they have managed to give the brand a personality and even mix in some humor. They have also devised a creative way to create new followers, like donating a dollar to charities of your choice for each new follower.

Staples has also had success with their Facebook Page. They created an app that lets you digitally shred or edit Facebook photos of yourself, they highlight their weekly deals, have a download button for their iphone app, have fun facts about the company, and offer other creative engagement strategies.

Social Media Strategies at Seattle's School of Visual Concepts

Social Media Strategies, a course we've taught close to 10 times now, is tomorrow at Seattle's School of Visual Concepts. Past classes have included folks from ad agencies, retail firms, broadcasting companies and more, so it's always a great day of discussion. Thanks Larry Asher and Linda Hunt for continuing to invite us quarter after quarter. See you tomorrow.

Reviewing Paper.li

There are a lot of semi-useless social media tools out there. One that we are liking more and more is Paper.li.

In a nutshell, it takes your Twitter feed, and distills it into a front page of a newspaper, so you can scan all the important topics you care about in one shot. It even splits them into categories like Sports, Media, Politics, Technolgy, etc....

Now, it only grabs feeds from the people you follow, so if you are one of those "uber important" types that only gets followed themselves, then it's not going to be much good. And if you follow a bunch of people that tell you about their sandwich, then you'll have a boring paper.li as well.

Here's part of the Monday morning grab from http://www.paper.li/social3i