June 23rd, 2010 by Dan
Social media makes an excellent arena for a marketing campaign to support a site’s SEO efforts. Not only are these sites easy for the average site owner to access, and free, they also group together concentrated clumps of target groups. A well-thought-out social media campaign can push a site’s entire search engine optimisation campaign forward.
The term frequently used for this is social media marketing, or SMM. This is a slightly misleading term, because a marketing plan for a social media site must be completely different to a regular marketing plan. The social media sites around the net tend to gather users who do not appreciate regular marketing approaches. Social media marketing, if it involves overt marketing at all, should involve a very light touch.
This is something that more than one business has found out all too late. Social media users are notoriously intolerant of pushy marketing campaigns and express their dislike very vocally. Quite a few campaigns mounted on sites like Twitter and Facebook have resulted in lots of publicity of the negative kind for the business involved, simply because the audience’s intelligence was underestimated.
It can help to have a consultant on board when mounting a social media campaign and you can discuss this with us at SearchEngineOptimisation.co.uk. Here are some guidelines that should help along the way:
1. Be open about your business motives. Many social media users have stated that they don’t mind being approached by a business, as long as the business is open about it. The thing that tends to rankle is when businesses pretend to be normal social media users for the purposes of manipulation. Trying to make friends and then springing a publicity campaign on them can seriously backfire.
2. Be willing to relax a little. Although your social media optimisation campaign has the driving motive of getting publicity for your business, it’s important to know when to let that go a little. Business owners who do nothing but talk shop are as boring on social media sites as they are at parties. Your search engine optimisation campaign will benefit a lot more if you relax and participate in the social media format you choose.
3. Be aware of the community around you. Although there are thousands of users on every social media site, most people settle into a group fairly quickly. Every social media user has friends and enemies, and businesses tend to polarise people even more.
4. Be friendly. Social media sites involve a lot of interaction. A lot of businesses hear this and think, ‘Wow! What an opportunity to sell my message.’ In doing this, they overlook the fact that it’s interaction. In other words, social media participation requires participation on your side as well. Commenting on other people’s pages and participating in debates is vital.
5. Keep your SEO in mind. Part of your reason for participating in social media should be to extend your off-page SEO. Keep your keywords and other optimisation techniques in mind when participating on the sites.
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