Monday, December 21, 2009

Now, SEO is Social Media

Gone are the days when any back-link to your website ranks you higher in search engines. Now, competition is immense, therefore contemporary search engine algorithms give power to those links only, which come from authority resources. Directory submission, article submission and so on are at one place but social media is going to be the only venue through which you can get authority links. We will see how future of Search Engine Optimization is linked with Social Media.

There used to be a lot other ways to get back-links easily and get higher rankings, but now these back-links don’t have enough juice to take you up on search engine rankings. For instance, directory submission was once a powerful tool to get back links, but if I can submit my website in 500 directories, my competitor can submit in 1000 and the chain goes on. So, who will get the higher position in search engine?

By looking at this matter, algorithms have been changed and now search engines look for quality and authority links only. And the best place to get these authority links is social media.

The question arises here how to get authority links from social media. For Instance, you have a website to sell cell phone accessories.

Identify Needs - You first have to identify needs of your target market. Find what they have been looking for. Listen to their conversation on different portals like Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo answers, blogs, and so on.

Create Killer Content - After need identification of your target audience, create killer content in shape of articles, ebooks, podcasts, vodcasts etc. and make it available on your business website or blog for the people around the social networks.

Spread The Content - Now, it’s time to spread the content over social media networks. Submit your content to social networking websites like slideshare, stumble upon, Youtube etc.

If your content is really impressive and has ability to educate, people over social networks will start to read and discuss about it. They will publish it to their websites and blogs for their audience which links back to your website and that eventually takes your website up in the search engine rankings.


Saturday, December 19, 2009

Review of the Articles Predicting Social Media Trends for 2010

2010 is not very far away. Debate over web is already going on that how social media will be in the coming year. Many trends watchers and trend makers have published research articles to predict the future aspects of social media by keeping the trends of past years in mind. Therefore, I have decided to review all the authority articles to see what conclusion we can extract about social media in the next year.

One authority article which has been published on Harvard Business Publishing is titled “Six Social Media Trends of 2010” and written by David Armano, who is a part of Dachis Group, an Austin based consultancy delivering social business design service. As Harvard is famous for business reviews, same essence of business philosophy can be found in the article.

In the opening of the article the writer directly predicts the future trend for 2010:

“So what could social media look like in 2010? In 2010, social media will get even more popular, more mobile, and more exclusive — at least, that's my guess.”

One other very important prediction is done about social media is that; most of the companies will have social media policy for the coming year. Let’s see how writer see this aspect:

“If the company you work for doesn't already have a social media policy in place with specific rules of engagement across multiple networks, it just might in the next year. From how to conduct yourself as an employee to what's considered competition, it's likely that you'll see something formalized about how the company views social media and your participation in it.”

Some more very important predictions have been done like mobile becomes a social media lifeline or sharing no longer means email and so on.

Other article on Bizreport.com titled “Social media on marketers' menu for 2010” by Helen Leggat describes:
“It looks like social media is on the menu for most marketers next year. A survey of almost 2,000 MediaPost subscribers found that over half plan to have "a presence on social networks" as part of their marketing mix in 2010.”

Writer further list down the social media venues according to popularity for 2010:

• Email, with 56.8% realistically planning to use it
• Social networks (56.3%)
• Keyword search (49.7%)
• Radio (42.2%)
• Magazines (42.1%)
• Online display (40.5%)
• Event sponsorship (36.9%)
• Rich media display (35.5%)
• Direct mail (34.7%)
• Regional TV (32.8%)
• Regional newspapers (31.7%)
• Out-of-home (31.2%)
• Email sponsorship (29.5%)
• Online video (26.7%)
• Mobile SMS text (26.1%)
• National TV (18.2%)
• National newspapers (14.8%)

A very famous blog of social media influencers, ReadWriteWeb.com, published a guest post titled “10 Ways Social Media Will Change In 2010”written by Ravit Lichtenberg, founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy.com. She has written her predictions in a very long and comprehensive manner and nearly covered all the matters related to social media in 2010. She opens her lines by giving the current figures:

“Today, it is impossible to separate social media from the online world. Facebook reached 350 million users last month -- 70% of whom are outside the US -- and it accounts for 25% of the Web's traffic, according to Pew nearly one in five people on the web use Twitter or some other service to check status messages, and 94% of enterprises plan to maintain or increase their investment in enterprise social media tools. The social media conversation is no longer considered a Web 2.0 fad -- it is taking place in homes, small businesses and corporate boardrooms, and extending its reach into the nonprofit, education and health sectors. From feeling excitement, novelty, bewilderment, and overwhelmed, a growing number of people now speak of social media as simply another channel or tactic.”

Among the 10 ways, one way she explained in the sub heading “Social Media Innovation Will No Longer Be Limited By Technology”, is a matter which I have already been thinking before. Let’s see how she discussed this prediction:

“With Web technology maturing and the near-elimination of previous barriers such as closed platforms and discrete logins, companies will now look to innovate the way they use existing technology, rather than focus on technology enhancements themselves. We will see a move to leverage existing assets -- content and capabilities -- in new ways, turning information to wisdom and insight to action. Whereas once user research required focus groups and usability tests, companies will utilize the Web's capabilities to achieve the same. Naturally occurring conversations will be utilized in product innovation and design, and companies will create incentives for people's attention and engagement while re purposing and analyzing content and engagement in new ways that will deliver valuable input.”

Social Media Today, a famous online social media community published an article “Five Social Media Predictions for 2010” by Joel Postman (originally published on socializedpr.com). I recommend this article worth reading as it has some rock solid predictions. In his one paragraph he predicts that:

“We’re nearing the end of the hegemony of Google Search. This is not to say Google is in immediate trouble, or some other search engine will take its place, but traditional search is becoming irrelevant, and other kinds of search will begin to challenge Google. Even Google, a Web 1.0 company — or Web 1.5 company at best — recognizes this, and launched its Social Search experiment. Technorati, an early leader in social (media) search, could have owned the space, and maybe they did for a while, but not anymore.”

Conclusion

All the articles which have been reviewed and which have not been reviewed but published on the internet already, more or less predict the same future of social media. Everybody is predicting the substantial growth of social media as well as marketing over it. Marketers will more tilt towards social media as compared to other venues of online and traditional marketing. Hence, the conclusion is that, social media will thrive drastically and create more charm for people around the world.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Article Review: 10 Tips to Get Re-tweeted On Twitter

Recently, a post published on Social Media Today (originally published on http://citysand.wordpress.com/) provides a comprehensive case study about tweets and retweets. The writer took the facts and figures from Dan Zarrella’s, and written a comprehensive article to figure out why people retweets. A very informative post for the people who are addict of Twitter as well as for those who use Twitter for marketing.
Facts and figures are graphically represented in the original post but you can take the following facts as a brief summary of the full script.

• 56.69% of retweets contain a link versus 18.96% of normal tweets.

• The use of tinyurl.com has been decreased, and the use of bit.ly has been increased for URLs shortening.

• “you” is the word which is the most retweetable.

• “game” is the word which is the least retweetable.

• “Colon” is the most retweetable punctuation mark.

• “Semicolon” is the least retweetable punctuation mark.

• 5PM is the peak time for retweets.

• 9AM is the nadir time for retweets.

• Friday is the best day for retweets.

• Sunday is the worst day for retweets.

Go to the link to read full article, Click Here

Lots of more informative articles regarding Social Media will be coming on Social Media Extremist so stay tuned....

Thursday, December 10, 2009

The Online Reputation Management Strategy

Online marketing and search engine optimization is one necessary goal of any organization, but online management of your business and brand reputation has more importance than other online marketing activities.

According to Warren Buffet, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”

In today’s market, consumer is empowered and can write words (negative and positive both) about your business, and broadcast over the internet with the sites like Ripoffreport.com, or give a negative review at Yelp.com. Review about your company could be placed on top of search engine rankings that can seriously damage your brand image. Therefore, you need to have preemptive online reputation management measures by creating and implementing a great online reputation management strategy.

Your online reputation management strategy could be comprises of the following 5 steps:

1. Business Profile

Creating a corporate profile over professional and business networks has very much importance to develop credibility among business circles. These networks can also be used for generating leads, marketing and selling, but more importantly it will work best for reputation management online. The following web 2.0 networks are exclusively built for corporate networking:

Biznik.com and many more


Blogging plays a vital role in increasing online presence. It also can work as a great tool for managing online reputation. Choose a blogging platform like blogspot or wordpress and write to provide knowledge about your product/ service, upcoming events, industry news etc to make yourself authority in the marketplace.


Many content sharing websites give you the power to share great content for the masses generally and for the target audience particularly. But in order to become authoritative and credible, you need to share some great content like industry research report, new market trends etc. in shape of articles, audio, video and so on. Scribd, DocStoc, SlideShare and YouTube are some great sites for the purpose of content sharing.

4. Press Releases

Press Releases spread like fire and bring your company in the news. Whenever you launch a new product or do changes in ongoing processes, press release is needed to be sent to press release websites for better visibility and for enhancement in online positive reputation. Some PR websites are PR.com, PRweb.com etc.

5. Link Building

Current search engine optimization wants authority links, so you should take extra care while building backward links for your website. Article syndication, one way links, link outreach, blog posting and commenting are few ways to get links back to your website. But remember, quality links are better than quantity links, make sure that you are not going to spam or use black hat techniques; otherwise your site would be penalized by search engines and never comeback on the top rankings again.

Friday, December 4, 2009

How to Monitor Social Media Conversations

Monitoring the activities over social media has become a hot topic lately. With an overwhelming success of online social media marketing platforms such as blogs, forums, micro-blogs and other social networking sites, people have open source to express what is in their mind and influence the thinking and behavior of other people. Monitoring the social media is keeping the track of all the discussions and conversations going on in the online business marketplace.

Monitoring of social media comprises of figuring out the objectives through listening, refining the discussions, analyzing and taking action. Moreover, monitoring of social media can be utilized by brands to improve product and service, customer service and feedback, marketing research and communication.

Listening

Listening of what people are talking about your brand, your competitors and the industry has foremost importance. People and their opinions influence consumer behavior. In order to show your customer service and to show that you value customer, watch out for any complaints against you or your competitor. In online world, prospective customers check other people opinions before making purchase decision.

Participating

Not only listening is necessary, participating and engaging in conversation with people online is also necessary. If you respond timely to any complaint or question, it will increase a consumer faith in your brand. Even if your brand has not talked about it’s essential to know the key influencers and what are they talking about. Start to discuss at places where you see potential and relevancy and establish your footprint so that you are equipped for any future talks of your brand.

Responding

During monitoring process, you understand the happenings and can implement relevant responses. If you respond properly to the queries, it will take you a long way to spread the good about your brand.

Using Applications

Many paid and free social media online applications are available to keep track of the conversations going on. It could be as simple as setting an alert through Google, Yahoo etc, searching for your brand name or the relevant keywords on Twitter, Social Media aggregators like Social Mention, Same Point, Back type and many others. There are several social media monitoring applications that can help in monitoring and analyzing your brand. For instance, radian6, Collective intellect and TechrigySM2 are some famous applications

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Three Essential Components of Online Social Media Marketing


A contemporary marketing venue of social media provides an opportunity to market your business to the masses. Yet very cheap (even free) social media marketing activities gives you a powerful hand to directly approach to the potential customer. It even let you know what the people are talking about your business, your industry and your target market. It’s easy but need crafting of successful marketing campaign to develop a complete business brand.

1. Understand you target audience

Before stepping into real marketing activities, you need to know who your target market is. Understanding needs, wants and demands is imperative in order to shoot the right target. If you don’t understand your target market, you would be wandering in the dark and getting nothing in the end. Analyze their demographic characteristics such as age, gender, and so on to be more specific with your offerings.

2. Add Value for the Potential Customer

After understanding your target market, it’s time to identify their problems and add value for them in your offerings. You can simply jot down their problem by interacting over various social networks such as yahoo answers. Start answering these problems in different sharing websites in the form of videos, articles, presentations and so on. Famous social media channels for this purpose are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and of course your own blog.

3. Connect With Your Audience

Now it’s time to connect with your potential customer on a one to one basis. Engage yourself in conversation with them. Have a personal interaction with them. If you give consideration and like what they share, ultimately they will start to like what you will share for them. And whenever they need a product or service you sell, they will obviously contact you for the business.

Your social media marketing activity is totally up to you, if you do it right you will get overwhelming success in minimum cost and time. And if you do it wrong, you will be wasting all your resources.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Social Media Marketing is Not Fad!!

The biggest debate over the internet is going on whether the social media is a revolution or just a fad. Two schools of thoughts have been developed; one says social media will be gone in few years while other says social media is the greatest economic shift since industrial revolution.

If we only talk about marketing and advertising over social media, in contemporary economic times, all businesses (small and large both) are more concern about cost cutting, so they have been shifting their marketing activities to social media channels. Its low cost. For instance, on Facebook page it has a case study of a shelf storage company, which $1.25 CPC delivered $10.25 cost-per-lead.

Number of users and marketers has been rapidly increasing every day. Compete.com shows recent statistics of twitter that the approximate unique visitors in October 2008 were 3,398,972, now in October 2009 it had 23,042,455; it’s a drastic positive increase of 577.92%. Similarly, Compete shows 188.67% of positive increase with 128,940,004 unique visitors in the month of October 2009 on Facebook.

Naturally, fad starts to decline very early, but social media indicators show positive growth of social media culture. Few more facts will hammer the last nail in the coffin that social media marketing is not fad it’s really a revolution.

1. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.

2. According to socialnomics, over 300,000 businesses have a presence on Facebook and roughly a 1/3 of these are small businesses.

3. $3,000,000 worth of computers sold by Dell on Twitter.

4. It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took four years to reach 50 million people...

In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.

If online social media marketing was a fad, it should have been gone already. But it is still there for several years and increasing. Large businesses have been using it for branding to make their logos more recognized and SMEs entrepreneurs have been using social media for marketing and advertising. So the end note of this article is that, by looking at the facts and trends, social media marketing is here to stay and will thrive in the coming years.

Note: facts and figures are collected from authentic resources over internet.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Networking through Social Media, Explained!

? What are social media networks?
? How social networking is so essential?
? On which structure social structure it belongs to which is making it exceptional?
? What are the basic parts of a social media networking site?

Social networking is something which is not a blue colored lava coming out from a tree. Its existence is always been there but its importance in the main stream becomes highly appreciated in past 5 years. But still it’s quite complex for the one to understand who is exceptionally coming out of the blue to social media networking.

Social networks posses a open-ended nature as you leaps in to the social network, and answered a few basic profile questions, its effortless to lay down on couch and marvel what you are suppose to do further.

The simplest way to get familiar with the social networking is to think like you are in a high school. You had a bunch of friends or some people you know around, but you didn’t know the entire crowd studying at your campus.

And when you have to change your school of to some reasons, then you must have an idea that what situation it would be, because you are starting up with no friend beings around you. After attending some lectures, you start to socialize by meeting the people and get associated with those who have the same thoughts and interests that you have.

Indulging into the world of social networking is as same like as you are going to start your new school. At first you don’t have any friends but as you join communities, you get to meet different people, and then select you friends from them by finding similarities between your interests and their interests.

SOCIAL NETWORKING STRUCTURE

Social networking must be pillared on concrete structure that permits the people to both express their own identity and communicate with the people having the same interests. This exclusive structure is included with, profiles, friends, blog posts, widgets, and commonly something unique to the particular social networking website—such as the ability to hi5 someone on Hi5 or poke someone on Facebook.

WHAT IS A PROFILE?

Profile is the promo your personality where you let the world know who you are, it includes the information about yourself like when did you born, where you get educated, which place you live, what are your core interests, what are your favorites and etc.

WHAT ARE FRIENDS?

Friends section of network is included with the trusted members of the site whom you have allowed to post comments to your profile and send private messages in your inbox. There are many options like tagging, live feeding, poking etc which you can avail with your friends. They are basically the heart and soul of the social networking. All the social networks have their own designations of the word friends, like in “LinkedIn” refers them as Connections.

WHAT ARE GROUPS?

Groups are the second most integral part of social network which helps in finding the friends of the same interests and thoughts indulging them into discussions on different topics. A group can be anything from “social media marketing professionals” to “people who like books” to “superman fans”. As “friends” get designated as “connections” so groups are also dual named as networks on facebook.

GROUPS MAKE YOU AWARE OF WITH TWO PRINCIPLES

One: They are the best option to meet the people of your interest as you are in small business then you can join a group where small business holders are sharing their thoughts, Which is quite suitable and make you able to share your experiences and learn from the others.

Two: second purpose they full fill is they make you able to find more information about your topic and make you reach the people who are related to same topic. For example: The Harry Potter group might have discussions about a particular plot line in the books or the location of an upcoming book signing by J. K. Rowling.

DISCUSSIONS

Original purpose of the groups is to build an interaction and relationship between the users in the form of discussions. Most of the social networking portals scaffold discussion black boards where the users chalk out their opinions, pictures, music, video clips etc.

BLOGS

Blogs are the powerful source of the social media networks which make the user enable to create their own blog submissions. While not as feature-rich as blog hosts like Wordpress or Blogger, blogging through a social network is perfect for keeping people informed on what you are up to.

WIDGETS

A popular way of letting your personality shine through is by gracing your social networking profile with web widgets. Many social networks allow a variety of widgets, and you can usually find interesting widgets located on widget galleries.

Social media networking permits the user to maintain light and more in depth contact with connections, links, associates and established friends. This continuous interaction and the growth of relationships will give you both short and long term benefits, in which some of them are unexpected plus surprising. For example, it’s quite usual for a person to endorse your website to another person without any intimation on your part. Through this process your small business can be able to turn into business world GODZILLA.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

The Extreme World of Social Media

We are living in the interesting times of new media; we have been captivated in an immersive, confusing and ultimate transition in our DAY JOB thing. If we don’t try to engage in, our competition will surely do. This whole piece of writing will let you know how new media is strengthened by the term of SOCIAL MEDIA.

The question evolved straight away, what do you mean by social media? Is it some kind of a genie which is fulfilling the wishes of the marketing levels or is it some kind of a magic base ball bat, hitting constantly home runs for the batters?
Yes, social media is something more than happening than those given examples. It’s simply to be defined as the world of conversation, communication and relationship. This is the human race of continuous dialogue.

“If a conversation is taking place online and you’re not there to listen to it or see it, did it actually happen? (Indeed. Conversations are happening and proceeding with or without you)”.

If you are a part of that conversation then you are welcoming others to contribute in-terms of question and answers and also providing them the information about everything they want. Whether it’s attacking or persuasive, accurate or correct or incorrect. Or, even worst when you will be leaving the competition to ride on to become the source for the community.

You fill be facing negative comments and you will be provoking the unsolicited feedback. People will start questioning about your intent. Negativity will not leave you simply because you opted for the participation. Negative commentary, at the very least is authentically a true opportunity to change the perception that you did or didn’t know existed.

Social media is breaking new grounds and setting higher standards all over the globe in the field of online marketing by engaging the users on its turf in order to help them solve problems, find the desired information about the product and making them dialogue which is found to be valuable for both the consumer and the brand.

Social media marketing is running on the principle of more and more engagement of the users following these hefty trends to achieve powerful competitive advantages.

Cultivate a more significant and substantial community

Enhance, augment and develop your brand

Build relationships stronger and fastened

And, create evangelists along the way.