How To Maximize SEO And Leads With Social Media Marketing

Marketing in the distributed web today can become very, confusing very fast.

Imagine you have content distributed all over the web and you continue to do this every week (and you should). Facebook pages, HubPages, Twitter, article directories….the list is endless, especially when you add the local and market focused social nets, blogs, and directories. If you did not have a strategy for managing the content and how you want to engage and move customers around your distributed content this can quickly become a giant mess. Even worse, the power of these efforts working together will be very diluted.

What to do? Track and plan…

1. Make sure you have tracking in place so you know where your content is and how well that vehicle is performing. Links within sites you are publishing content to should have tracking code (bit.ly is one of many solutions for this) so you can measure your return on time and money. You can also look at your Google Analytics reports and look at the reference sites report to measure how productive your social media efforts are by channel (e.g Facebook, ezine articles etc).
2. Social media marketing is as much about SEO as it is about increasing your digital footprint to generating leads and traffic. So, planning out anchor text cross linking in advance will really help make sure that you (or whoever you outsourced social media page creation and maintenance to) maximize this opportunity. Remember you want to send “link juice” to your social media authority sites as well as your website. Think of it as a nest that becomes woven together into a solid cross linking strategy.
3. Be consistent with your linking strategy as you publish new content every week to the various sites. Make adjustments to what content topics you focus on as you learn from your tracking.

Putting it all together is where the magic happens for your business. This will separate the companies that throw-up a Facebook page and think they are doing social media marketing from the businesses that are using it as a serious business building tool.

What do you think?

Social Media Marketing: The Game Where Everyone Gets To Play Publisher!

The game in social media marketing is to build authority in your market or niche.  Why? To differentiate your business and build a defensible mote that can get you more pricing power, special relationships and winner of the coolest business in your market award!

To play this social media marketing game, you will come to the realization that you are now in the content publishing business.  Blogs, articles, whitepapers, ebooks…Phew!  We know this is overwhelming for most businesses and marketing organizations. We can tell by looking at your eyes as we explain the social media strategy and programs that your business should launch…yes, we can see your eyes start to widen and a sudden panic set’s in.

Copyblogger has a terrific post The 7 Realities of Social Media Marketing that characterizes this issue well.

Ok, take a deep breath and follow these steps:

1. Make sure you have a strong Unique Selling Proposition in your market or niche.  A clearly defined positioning will help you think about content strategy and be much more engaging and passionate about your message.

2. Don’t sell, teach! The distributed web is a collection of conversations in social media settings where a hard sell will be out of place.  The way to get attention is to inform and educate.  Should be easy because you are an expert in your market right?

3. Use content that answers the questions and issues your target customers are searching for.  Do some research to find out what these questions are.  Look in the forums they hang out in, Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn Answers, conduct surveys, do keyword research. If you get this right, your will have a content strategy that your customers will flock to read.

4. SEO and site design matter! You will need to get your site structure right with landing pages, “link bait” and distributed content all lined up so you get the SEO benefit of this effort and convert target customers to your list.

5. Outsource content development and other tasks.  Don’t abdicate it, just outsource so you can maximize your internal resources on what they do best and benefit from expert writers, content publishers website designers and SEO specialists.

We are not saying this “new normal” of marketing is easy. But if you plan well, do the research upfront and outsource help you will succeed. Even better, you will get there faster, better cheaper than competitors.

What are tricks that you use to produce and publish great content?