6 Steps in Developing a Social Media Strategy

Posted by Ron Jones in Social Media Strategy on May 6, 2011

Social media is around us more and more and many companies are starting to see the value in add it to their marketing mix. However many are simply unsure where to start or how to develop a plan.  By using social media correctly you can engage your audience in new ways, be more personable, develop new connections and maintain the ones they have. So I will outline the development of a social media strategy with these 6 steps:

social media strategy steps

Social Media Strategy Steps

1. Listen – Conversation Mining

The first step in this process is to get online and listen to what is being said. How are people feeling about you and your brand? What are their points of views?  Identify the key people who influence others and which ones should you cooperate with? What are the various topics? Is the tone of the conversation heated?  Do people favor one point of view over the other, or is it mixed?

Determine your audience and where they are online. Blogs are a great place to start looking. Technorati (http://technorati.com) is a good tool to help you search for blogs and blog posts that have content related to your niche. Twitter and the twitter network is another great place to gain insight in to conversations that are happening in real time. The advance twitter search (http:search.twitter.com/advanced) is one of many tools that will let you isolate specific conversations and monitor them.

Once you have identified where your audience is then listen to what they are saying. What are their issues, opinions and needs? How does this information fit with your value proposition? Understanding this information will help you determine how to best contribute to the conversation and how best to make a contribution.

Next find out who is driving the conversation or those that have a strong influence? These people are called “Influentials” because they possess the authority, respect or experience to shape people’s opinions. A good example is Lance Armstrong. Since I am a cyclist I follow what he has to say. If he endorses a product you can be sure I will check it out. Find these people who influence your industry or niche and listen what they are talking about. One source to get you started on finding these Influentials is to look at WeFollow (www.wefollow.com which breaks down Influentials by category and list them by the number of followers.

2. Identify Goals and Objectives

You should now be in a better position to establish your goals now that you have had a chance to “listen” to your audience. Some goals might be to drive a certain amount of traffic to your website. Or you want to increase the number of followers by 15% in 6 months. Maybe you just want to extend you brand presence on the social web.

Remember you need to consider not only your company goals but the goals of your audience. What are their needs and wants? You will get much farther with social media marketing if you offer something of value to them. I see many people who are just simply promoting themselves all of the time hoping they will attract new customers or site traffic. This really doesn’t work well with social media.

Once you have given people something of value you have earned the right to plug yourself a little. I recommend that you spend about 90% of your time providing valuable content and 10% promoting yourself. You will find you can build more influence and trust with the value you provide your followers.

3. Develop Your Plan and Time Your Content

Map out your approach to delivering content to your audience. Will you reach out and leverage Influentials? Will you provide free material or samples? How will it be delivered?  Maybe you have products that are environmentally friendly. Will you moderate and lead a conversation about environmental issues? There are many creative ways to approach your audience. Be innovative.

Next develop a timeline, preferably 12 months in advance, to identify any events, promotions or product launches that you are aware of. Now identify the content ideas you want to deliver that can supplement those events. It is like developing a media plan where you are timing your efforts so they are consistent and relevant to other events your business or customers participate in. You will find that it will be much easier to manage content creation efforts and allow you to plan ahead.

social media timeline

social media timeline

Now identify the social platforms you should use to deliver your content. Is Facebook the right platform for you? Is it a combination of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn? If so you should develop a mini plan for each site and how you will consistently use each tool to accomplish your goals and objectives. Be careful not to go after too many sites too quickly. I would make sure you start with one or two sites at a time and develop them so they are solid before moving on to another social media site.

4. Develop Your Content

The next step is to develop the content you have outlined from the timeline you have built. The timeline will help you know what order to start building your content. This is where you really need to understand your audience and your brand. You need to be highly creative and much of what you say within social media channels should sound like your brand.

This is a great place to optimize your content with your targeted keywords. Armed with a solid keyword research report with relative categories you should be able to derive some great ideas for content that is relevant and will resonate well with your audience. This content can come in various forms. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

 

  • Promotions with deals to participants – daily deals
  • Tips or how to’s
  • Little known facts or factoids
  • White papers
  • Relevant and timely statistics
  • Ask your community – take polls and share results
  • Invite guest authors
  • Top 10 lists
  • Case studies
  • Guides to help educate
  • Interviews
  • Live events
  • News
  • Opinions
  • Photos
  • Gift ideas

5. Engage – Implement Your Plan

Armed with smart objectives, a solid timeline, great content and the right social media sites you are now ready to post your content. Engage in the conversation and express your point of view. Remember to keep to your schedule and be constituent. Have the resources on hand to respond to comments and feedback so you can keep the conversation going. This is not an “if you build it they will come” type of scenario. You have to keep at it.

6. Measuring Success

As you know the ability to measure the effectiveness of marketing activities is imperative to any company’s marketing strategy. Social Media Marketing isn’t as easy to measure as other online channels but it can be done.  If you identified your success metrics in step 2 then you are already ahead of the game.

Depending on your success metrics you might look at content consumption. Who is reading your content and where are they coming from. You can also look at how much or little is being contributed and the number of visitors who are interacting with your content. Here are some variables to include in your measuring process:

  • Share of Voice
  • Awareness
  • Engagement
  • Influence
  • Popularity

I will discuss these in more detail in a future post. Feel free to send me any success metrics that have worked for you and that you found to be effective.

Having a solid social media strategy can really help make a difference in the success of your campaigns. You will come off more polished and organized and viewed as being a real player in the social media space.

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Universal Search Optimization 101

Posted by Ron Jones in Universal Search on February 14, 2010

Now that we’ve covered the fundamentals of universal search, it’s time to look at how to optimize for this new search experience.

Universal (or blended) search refers to the non-traditional results we see in the SERPs. The results could be video, images, local search, news, shopping, or other rich content. Let’s look at specific things you should do to optimize these areas.

Optimize for Image Search

You’ve probably heard the adage that a picture speaks a thousand words. Well why not use that to your advantage?

Web sites are often too text heavy. Choosing the right images to help tell the story without a lot of text can provide a better user experience if done correctly. Sometimes images help create an emotional attachment to the products or services you offer.

To optimize for universal or blended search:

  • Incorporate rich ALT text for each image. Remember to intuitively describe the image using targeted keywords. The more descriptive the better.
  • Include your keywords in the image file names.
  • Make sure that the content that surrounds the image is highly relevant. Relevancy is always a key factor in optimization.

imize for Video Search

Video has become one of the best tools for optimization because it serves multiple purposes. It helps engage visitors, keeps them on your site longer, and reduces your bounce rate.

One of the best ideas for developing video content is to add instructional or how-to videos. Try keeping them between two to three minutes in length.

Don’t forget the crucial step of tagging your video with the right keywords. Upload your video to popular video sites like YouTube to help get more exposure and increase popularity.

Optimize for Local Search

Whether your business has a single location or multiple locations, you should optimize your site for local search. In addition to registering your site with local search engines, consider having a page on your site that includes all of your local information. For instance, you could have a listing of all of your branches or store locations with current addresses. This will help ensure they show up correctly and accurately.

Optimize for News

Do you have any newsworthy content about your company or organization? Publishing press releases and other newsworthy information is a great way to get listed in blended results, especially if the news is timely and relevant.

Notice in this search for “iPad” that news results came first in the SERP and right after it come the real-time results. So get your news releases published and you might end up at the top of the list.

Optimize for Social Media and Blogs

If you haven’t participated in social media yet, you should give it a try. Many social media sites and blogs are indexed by the search engines, especially real time posts from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites and blogs.

As you can see in the image above, real time results are usually given a top spot on the SERPs. Additionally, social media gives people more touch points to your brand and increases awareness.

Optimize for Shopping

Many people like to go online to shop for products, even if they plan to purchase from a brick and mortar store. They like to gather compare features and pricing.

Shopping results are an important factor in blended search. If you have a product, consider registering it with Google Base. Sign in to their merchant center and upload your product feeds and other info.

Notice in the example above how images play a role in the shopping experience. As with most SEO best practices, make sure you have relevant and targeted keywords in your product title and description. Also, keep your feeds updated regularly with any new product information.

It’s best if you can holistically repurpose your content into each of these media types so they all work together in concert. Each of these are extensions to your site and its content.

When searchers finally make it to your site, there should be a commonality and cohesiveness from one media type to the other. This takes planning and preparation.

What has worked for you in the past? Please share your experiences with the rest of us in the comments below.

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Universal Search 101

Posted by Ron Jones in Universal Search on February 2, 2010

During your SEO studies, you might have come across the term universal search or blended search. Not sure what it means or how it works? Then this article is for you.

Universal search has been around since 2007 when Google announced a significant change to its search engine. Soon after, Ask announced their Ask 3D platform and Microsoft Live announced their new Live Search. Yahoo followed up with what they called the new Yahoo Search.

Now all the major search engines use a new form of search results designed to bring a better user experience to searchers. So what is universal or blended search?

What is Universal Search?

These upgraded search engines return more than the just the traditional text results. Now they bring back images, news, local listings, shopping, video, blog posts, etc.

For example, go to Google and type in “iPad” and see what shows up in the SERP. You’ll see news, real time posts, images, and the usual text results. All of this blended together is what universal search is all about — trying to provide a richer experience to the searcher who may be looking for more than just a site to visit.

Try this out yourself. Go to each of the major search engines and see if you can identify how each attempt to provide this experience.

What Does Universal Search Mean to Search Marketers?

New rules mean new challenges for search marketers. No longer are you trying to just optimize for certain textual content, but now you need to optimize for video, images, local, news, and blog results. Plus, you may have enjoyed good rankings in the past but now they have been pushed down by each of these new data sources.

If you don’t have any of these data sources on your Web site, achieving the rankings you desire might be harder. The process of optimization just became more complex.

Look at your approach to universal search holistically. Don’t look at optimizing for just video, then images, then news, for instance. Look at all of your digital assets and see how they all fit together and relate to one another.

In some cases, you may need to create new content. This isn’t a bad thing. You really need to have more than just text content to compete in today’s marketplace. You need to have all of the other media types as well.

How to Optimize for Universal Search

If you plan to launch a new product and put it on your Web site, don’t just add the usual picture and text about the product. Take it much further. Add a press release and post to PR sites for promotion. Then add a blog post. Produce a short video about the product and post accordingly. Go beyond your Web site and push this content into various social media channels.

Do you see where this is going? Again, if you think of this with a holistic perspective and from the beginning it will be a lot easier to manage.

There are many other aspects of optimizing for universal search. This chart, with comments from some industry experts, does a good job of showing specific things you can do to optimize for universal search.

Hopefully you understand that you need to produce, optimize, and promote all of the media types that your customers/visitors and search engines will respond to.

Be optimistic. Don’t look at this as more work on your part, but as a new opportunity to develop richer content and explore new marketing channels. As you create new content in different media types you will be setting yourself up for the long term and building a sustainable, searchable infrastructure that will keep you going way into the future.

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Quality Score 101

Posted by Ron Jones in Quality Score on January 5, 2009

Happy New Year! Hopefully, one of your resolutions is to increase your quality score for your paid search campaigns. This will help you save money on your bid and increase your rank position. A good goal, huh?

It’s been about two years since Google and Yahoo implemented their quality score algorithms. Well, Google actually started their quality score program back in 2005 — they just didn’t tell advertisers. It wasn’t until 2007 that advertisers were provided information on what their quality score was and how to make it better.

Prior to that, the old bid-to-position model was used: whoever had the most money secured the top position. While this proved lucrative, it also affected reputation and trust. Just because an advertiser has more money to spend doesn’t mean they’re the best choice for the top spot.

Search engines decided to factor in the quality of the landing pages that ads send users to, as well as the relevance and quality of ads. Let’s take a closer look at what affects the quality score.

What is Quality Score?

Google says, “Quality Score is a dynamic variable calculated for each of your keywords. It combines a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query.”

Quality score affects your keywords minimum CPC and position in the search results. It could even affect whether or not your ad even shows up. A great quality score will net you a low minimum bid and higher ad placement.

Where is my Quality Score?

In Google, your quality score can be found in the Ad Group level and in “keywords” tab. The quality score column should be next to the keyword status column. If you don’t see it, then find the pull-down menu (show/hide columns) and select “Show Quality Score.” The three indicators that are visible are “Poor,” “OK,” or “Great.”

In Yahoo Panama, the quality score also appears in the ad group level and is called “Quality Index.” Yahoo’s indicators are five bars. Your goal is to fill all those bars.

Microsoft doesn’t yet have quality score information in their AdCenter, but I understand they’re close.

Minimum Bid

We all want to spend as little as possible on our keywords. Let’s look at factors that affect minimum bid.

One factor is the historical CTR of each keyword. If you’ve had poor performance historically, then it may take some good performance time to have this work in your favor.

Keyword relevance to the ads in the ad group is another factor. If your keywords don’t relate well to your ads, you get a lower quality score.

Similarly, if the landing page you’re pointing to has little or no relevance to the keyword and your ad, you’ll wind up with a poor quality score. This is one of the most important factors, which we’ll cover next time in Part 2.

Other historical factors include the account history or the CTR of all ads and keywords in your account, and the display URLs in the ad group.

Keyword Position

The factors that will help you to increase your keyword position are similar to those for the minimum bid. Relevance again is vitally important. In this case, it’s the relevance of the keyword and ad to the search query.

If you type in a search query and see ads with your query or one that is similar, which one will you click on? Making this match will help your score and create a better experience for the searcher.

Finally, as with the minimum bid factors, your account history will also affect your score positively or negatively. Keep an eye on your historical CTR for all of your keywords.

Quality score isn’t just a new gimmick for the search engines. Search engines want to provide users with a good experience and trust. It’s also designed to help advertisers drive quality, qualified traffic, to a site.

Assuming you also have a relevant landing page that provides great content that complements the keywords and ads that your visitor used to find you, you’ll provide a great experience for your new potential customers. We’ll talk more about the importance of developing quality landing pages in Part 2 next week.

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