Internet Marketing Strategies - Social Networking

Internet Marketing Strategies - Social Networking

 

 

My “sales” hat is starting to look more and more like a marketing hat. And I’ll bet that my marketing counterparts are starting to feel a lot more like sales people as well. Sales and Marketing have always been closely aligned, but the lines are now very blurred between the two.

 

So as Sales 1.0 becomes Sales 2.0 – we all need to know a bit more about things like SEO (search engine optimization) and how that is affected by social networking.

 

First of all, it might be comforting to know that Fortune 500 companies do now fare well when evaluating the effectiveness of their SEO campaigns. More than 50% had NO natural search visibility within their targeted keywords. (I only mention this so you realize that this IS hard stuff – and constantly changing.) And by the way – the size of a website does not have a direct correlation how well a website ranks for a particular search term.

 

So how can we take advantage of social media to boost our SEO rankings?

 

·      Leverage user-generated content: Amazon does an amazing job with this. They highly leverage reviews and recommendations allowing this unique content for nearly every product and on an on-going basis.

 

·      Present content in a unique or interesting way: The eventual success of content isn’t always about the quality, but often about the WAY in which the content is presented. Think of ways that you can change the user’s experience so that they’ll want to share it with their community. This can be a fun tool, a humorous video, and unexpected analysis.

 

·      Quantity is as important as quality: Hubspot did a study of more than 2,000 customers and found that those who published blogs 5x/week drew 6.9x organic traffic, and 1.2x referral traffic than those sites that don’t blog at all. 

 

·      Have your information available on a variety of channels: Share company videos on YouTube, share blog posts on Twitter, set up a Fan Page on Facebook, create job postings on LinkedIn.  In order to succeed online, we need to take up as much virtual shelf space as we can.

 

I have to long ways to go in the social networking, SEO space – but it’s fun stuff – and I know that my success, and the success of my clients – depends on my comfort with wearing both a sales and a marketing hat.