The SMX ( Search Marketing Expo)Social Media marketing threw in some nice tips and pointers about Social Media marketing. Moderated by Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, this kickoff session reviewed the basics of what you need to know in the world of SMM. SMX Social media marketing was held at NY on October 16th,2007
Rand Fiskin of SEOmoz spoke first of the importance of social media and why it is important. From April 2006 to April 2007, social media use increased by 668%. These statistics are quite enlightening and with social media usage becoming an intergral part of everyday web activities. Its important that online Marketers understand where the real USP of social media lies and what they need to do to tap onto this "Social Web"
Rand also talked on Online Reputation management , A Topic which I liked a lot . Basically Rand says that companies must creat Robust profiles in Social networking sites in their respective industry verticals or in some of the places where the gliterrati and cognoscenti generally resides. That may either me at Linkedin.com, MySpace or Facebook. Individuals and Companies whho are looking for branding and creating a disctinct Brand personality must try to leverage social networks by creating profiles that would appeal to their target segments.
Rand says
"These profiles not only let you have some control about what’s being said about your online (and can potentially rank above less-flattering pages that you don’t control), but you can generally include a link to the site you’d like to direct visitors, thus grabbing you some extra traffic."
If you haven’t set up profiles on these sites, you might be missing an opportunity. The highest ranking profile pages for me (several in the top 10) on Tafiti are: - Wink (your profile is created for you, but you can claim and edit it)
- Blogger (you can create a profile even if you don’t have a Blogger blog)
- Google Groups
- Spock (like with Wink, you can claim and edit your profile)
- LinkedIn
- SEOmoz
Rand Fishking also gave an interesting statistics about blog readers !
Asian markets have the highest engagement of blog readers (74% of Japanese read blogs; 23% of Americans do). The percentage of influences is higher -- 91% for Japan.
How do readers find blogs? Mostly links (67%)! 20% find blogs from search engines, and 23% find them through recommendations. Interesting, blog search engines account for less than 6%. More proof of why Google keeps leaning to universal search, as no one uses the verticals.We knew Google Blog Search did not make sense , but now we know why.
Video Sharing Market : 72% of Internet users watch online videos now, and that number is rising. Here are the breakdown what popular consuming trends of video users .News (37%), comedy (31%), and movies (16%). Primarily, people find video from links friends have sent them. Only 7% of viewers pay to watch video.By 2011 86.6% of Americans will be watching online video.
Rand also outlines how things have changed in the marketing 2.0 Webspace. Earlier webmasters relied on good old search engines by doing reciprocal links, crafting an email marketing strategy and using tools that hardly could increase your traffic geometrically . But now by tapping the social web, you can actually increase traffic virally . For that you need to reach out to what Rand calls the "Literati" or the key "web influencer's."
He says that most of your readers and customers may like you, but don't link you necessarily, they embedd your link to their friends pages, or sends the link as an email to their friends. So you have to engage the linkerati to get the links. And you get to them through blogs, forums, blog comments, social media sites, and old school methods like word of mouth and traditional marketing.
So, what kinds of content are these linkerati influencers likely to link to? Great design, ad-free content, great writing, clear navigation, clever graphics, non-commercial content, high accessibility, and authoritative resources. They don't like poor site architecture, forced registration, obtrusive ads, long, dynamic URLs (they're just too hard to email), unprofessional design, hard-to-read text, and articles split between multiple pages (also hard to link).
A few ways to be succesful with social media is is when you or your company successfully incorporates these tactics into your social media marketing plan, you can increase brand awareness and increase traffic to your site or subscribers to your blog. These can also lead to increased conversions and sales for your company.
below are a few web sites and verticals where you can start off your "Social media marketing"
Social News Aggregation Portals. This is where users can submit content to others where it can be viewed, voted upon ad ideally made one of the popular posts that day. Some great social news sites include Reddit, Digg,
Sphinn, Propeller and Newsvine.
Social Networking Communities. The most famous of these networking sites are Facebook/ tagged/Perfspot/MySpace/ LinkedIn./Care2.com
User-Generated Content sites. Here, the user creates and submits content for content’s sake, which makes the content and your company highly visible. We have all seen videos on YouTube and read definitions on Wikipeida and viewed images on Flickr. These are some fun and popular examples of user-generated content sites.
Popular Blogs. The most popular blogs are read by several thousand daily readers, so if you have one of these blogs, make sure the content is visible and influence-able. A few popular blogs with great amounts of information are Techcrunch, Boing Boing and Lifehacker.,You can get to know whats hot and whats not at technorati.
Social Bookmarking Sites. Tag and save your content for others to view, and when it is popular it gets more visibility StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and ma.gnolia,diggit,Rawsugar,Dotthis are all popular sites.
Niche and Topical Participatory sites. These sites focus on topics in a specific vertical where users with that interest can join and promote content. A couple examples here are Slashdot, Fark, Truemors and upcoming.org.
The Long-Tail of Blogs, Forums and Groups. These are smaller targeted niche-communities and blogs which leverages the "Long tail of search". To find them in your industry or interest group, do a blog search and read the forums or go through your industry Press Release.( Barrack Obama Blog/gay lesbions Associations/left handers Blogs/
Mainstream Media Portals. Recently these large, well-known news brands have been offering a social aspect to their websites. Just last week The New York Times began showing comments on their stories on their homepage. Other well-known news brands offering these social aspects are cnn.com and news.google.com
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