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?

Bookmarking For Social Media Marketing

Social bookmarking sites are terrific tools for the digital age. My favorites are Delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon, but their are many that you can explore. One of the reasons why I like those three is they have the largest community and tend to get the most exposure.

Social bookmarking can be a used in two ways:

1. Generating more exposure and external links for your content. Once you bookmark and tag your articles, blog posts, videos and such they are recognized and cataloged for others who are following you. You are letting them know that for whatever subject you tagged the content under, this is valuable information. Key here is you just can’t be tagging your own content. These sites are sophisticated enough to know if you are doing that, and will not allow you to continue.  Also, people will lose interest in what you are tagging if you are just tagging and promoting your own content. If the idea is to become a trusted authority using social media, being a self promoter is not the way to accomplish this goal.

2. Managing work flow for down stream management of writing and publishing tasks. One of the biggest obstacles we get from senior execs is that social media marketing requires to much time. Not if you plan right and integrate tasks into the work flow of your organization. Social bookmarking sites allow you to create a tag structure with group access so information can be collected using the “collective wisdom” of the exec team. A tight tag structure like writers, publications, partners, bloggers, forums, articles, allows your organization to collect, organize and then disseminate this information down, or out, of the organization for content to be developed and published. For example, you can tell a junior staff member in marketing to keep an eye on the forums and blogs that are tagged and make sure they regularly listen and participate in them. No further communication is needed and this task is now outsourced (or in-sourced in this case).

Now, you need to be careful here that you don’t end up just abdicating these tasks to the point where you’re not getting the benefit from participation. There is a balance that you need to strike and only you will know what that is. Minimally you need a feedback loop that keeps you plugged into what is going on.

Social bookmarking is not a panacea when it comes to marketing exposure. It is a nice to have but if you have not done things like article marketing, blogging, video distribution and building web 2.0 pages like Facebook yet, you can probalby spend your time more effectively elsewhere for now. I do suggest using it for work flow quickly because it makes implementing social media marketing so much easier.

Also, keep in mind these are two totally different objectives for bookmarking and should be treated as such. Have separate accounts so competitors can’t see what you are tracking for content and strategy development purposes.  Create a persona for your work flow account.

Are you using bookmarking? Do you have any ticks to make it more effective?

The Importance Of Workflow For Social Media

Implementing a comprehensive social media marketing program can seem overwhelming for any organization.  Keeping up with content development, blogging, posting and the buzz in your industry is tough while you try to run your business.

Integrating a common bookmarking system with common tag structure is a terrific way to keep everyone in the loop while automating downstream workflow.  We implement Delicious bookmarking for our own team and client organizations. As senior executives identify key ideas, content, writers, blogs, forums, competition etc across the Internet, they are able to organize, store and integrate these into a downstream workflow for others to write articles, sign up new writers or participate in key discussions without having to do all of it themselves.

You can implement lots of neat tricks to manage your time effectively and have an impact in the distributed web.  Think process and workflow…remember, social media marketing is a strategic implementation. A completely new way of doing businesses.  Treat it the same way you would any new large company initiative.  It needs to fit into the daily lives of your employees and their workflow to have a sustainable impact on your businesses.

Now just do it!