Search Engine Marketing Specialist Dan Cristo

Search Engine Marketing with Social Media

Let’s start from the beginning… What is social media?
To understand where social media is today, we need to understand how it started. Long before there were web sites (pre-1994/HTML), the Internet consisted of bulletin boards; the predecessor to the modern day forum. Bulletin boards were threaded discussions that people could post messages too.

After that we saw News Groups emerge. News groups were largely unregulated gatherings of people who shared common interests; such as Ford Mustangs or Gas Prices?. News groups were structured by keywords and sorted by dates, so visitors could view the most recent posts. Viewers also had the ability to respond to posts, much like the modern day forum or blog. One of the major differences between early news groups and modern forums were the lack of moderators. There was no one there to keep the posts on topic, or administer the group. The lack of regulation, coupled with the openness for anyone to contribute resulted in a lot of lengthy, heated arguments between users.

The next form of social media that emerged was one of users opinions integrated into ecommerce. Web sites like Ebay and Amazon began incorporating their visitor’s opinions into their site in order to raise the confidence level of buyers. Ebay for example added, “Seller reviews”, so that buyers would feel more comfortable purchasing from an individual. Amazon did the same thing with user reviews and ratings. This is the core concept of social media, allowing the opinions and thoughts of others, outside the manufacturer, to influence your buying decision.

Today’s Social Media Channels:

1. Forums
2. Blogs
3. Media Sharing
- Videos (thank you to Eric for pointing out this formatting correction)
- Photos
- PowerPoint
4. Networking
5. Knowledge Sharing
6. Bookmarking

Let’s Understand Each Social Media Channel:
Forums:
Forums are discussion outlets centered on a topic or multiple similar topics. There are forums for just about any subject matter; Golden Retrievers, for example. I did a search for “Golden Retriever Forum” and my first result was: www.goldenretrieverforum.com. Go figure. This forum has thousands of members disusing every conceivable topic relating to Golden Retrievers – how to breed them, how to train them, proper nutrition, dog showing techniques, everything! They also have pictures and videos, even bio’s of their dog! Becoming a forum member is typically free, and is often required to participate in the community. Forums are one web site structure that is exceptionally search engine friendly. They are mostly text driven, content rich, theme oriented and updated frequently. Search engines love forums for their question/answer style of information, and modern forum software has done a great job structuring the content for search engines to find.

Popular forum software is usually cheap or free, and accessible to almost anyone. Most web hosts have pre-installed scripts which making adding a forum to your web site extremely easy. The hardest part of creating a successful forum is building the community. Forums take quite a bit of upfront work to establish an active community, but once the site is flourishing, it’ll take on a life of its own and your primary concern will be moderating and managing the vast amount of content added each day.

Typically forums are owned by a single owner. They’ve invited others to help moderate it, and have setup rules to help keep order – unlike the news groups mentioned earlier.

Now what are moderators and why do forums need them? Well, whenever you have a large group of people, you’re going to have two things.

1. Arguments
2. Spammers

The main job of a moderator is to make sure conversations stay on topic and don’t spin off into heated arguments, and to remove unwanted advertisements and unrelated posts.

Blogs:
Blogs have actually been around for a while, but only recently have they exploded into the forefront of the Internet.

The word Blog is a combination of Web and Log. The idea here is to allow individuals to keep a diary or log of their day online. Many blogs are personal blogs where owners write about events in their life, or thoughts they’ve had during the day.

The most characteristic aspect of blogs are, “feeds”. A feed is really a subscription to a blog where subscribers can be alerted when new content is added. The technology behind the most common feeds is RSS. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and basically takes new content and pushes it out to subscribers who can read the feed through various RSS readers.

Blogs have incredible search marketing capabilities, as the content management system used by most blogging software is naturally very search engine friendly. With a few minor changes to the blogs “settings” and a couple downloadable add-on’s, most of the on-page optimization for a blog is done automatically. Blogs usually have a lot of incoming links to them, as most blog owners freely link to other bloggers.

The combination of frequently updated content, ease of accessibility, and whirling inbound/outbound links makes blogs a great target for search engines trying to keep their indexes up to date.

Media Sharing: (addition: Images, Videos and Powerpoint presentations are not social on their own, they only become social when people begin sharing them)
Video sharing web sites like YouTube have sprung up recently to change how we view the Internet. Once broadband Internet connections became prevalent, the concept of watching video clips online became a reality. What YouTube did was alter the landscape, allowing anyone with a video camera the ability to author and distribute content online. Videos started to become viral, meaning awarness about the video went beyond word of mouth, and was quickly spread throughout the Internet - much like a virus spreads from person to person. The popularity of YouTube makes this channel an attractive marketing opportunity. Companies and traditional advertises alike realize the reach YouTube has, and have used it to promote their own videos.

In 2007, Google began implementing YouTube (which Google purchased the same year) videos right into their search engine results pages. This not only brings greater visibility to YouTube visitors, but also makes video optimization a necessary part of search engine marketing.

Tags: Blogs, digg, flickr, forums, Google, Keywords, Social Media, youTube

3 Responses to “Search Engine Marketing with Social Media”

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website