SEO, Meet Social Media Marketing
Danny Sullivan moderates.
Speakers are Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz, Todd Malicoat – independent consultant, Neil Patel of ACS, and Cindy Krum of Blue Moon.
What does it have to do with SEO? Danny asks.
Rand Fishkin is up.
This is advanced material he says. It’s the lifeblood of acquiring links and getting traffic.
Social media marketing vs. viral marketing. It’s all about the link bait. SMM is all about going out to Web 2.0 style sites with the mentality of contributing.
Viral marketing is creating content and leveraging it for content, traffic, ranking and search success.
Tip: What can SMM do for you? Can control your brand. Great way to own your SERPs is to create al ot of social media profiles. Gives some link love when creating accounts.
Which sites provide the most value?
Youtube is #1. Potential for millions of visitors. Shows his marriage proposal video on YouTube. 22 million views to date! –
#2 best site in his opinion is Wikipedia for SMM.
#3 Yahoo Answers – creeps into Google, Yahoo and MSN SERPs. Phenomenal resource he says. Some people he knows get all their business from Yahoo Answers.
#4 Yelp – powerful on West Coast for local review/directory.
#5 Linked in
#5 Flickr – comments on Flickr dont have nofollow! That’s hot, he says. Opportunity for link building.
#6 Craigslist has great penetration on the web, but all content is temporary. Get on the Best of Craigslist page is like gold. Get there by community votes.
#7 Facebook
#8 Myspace
#9 Amazon social media – drives targeted traffic. Get to influence buyers.
#10 Technorati – not so social, but taggin content can be powerful. Great tags send great referrels, also nofollow links.
#11 Judy’s book – an emerging localize social network.
#12 Newsvine, contributing and seeding. Lots of traffic. More mature audience.
#13 Twittr – hates it, can’t find a good community. Danny says he gets alot of traffick from Twittr.
#14 – CitySearch – great for local businesses.
#15 WikiHow – great for getting links and traffic.
Before submitting, read and get to know the network. Understand the community!
Viral media is great for branding. Apple commercials are the perfect example. Viral media = search rankings through links. Find a topic you want to rank for, and write great content about it. Viral media = growing fanbase. Everytime SEOmoz creates linkbait, gets a growing RSS subscriber base.
Where should you do viral marketing – Digg, Reddit (more political). StubleUpon – 2.5 million users. Great for traffic and great links.
Delicious, Netscape – less valuable, but more serious news.
Techcrunch – amazing traffic if can get in. SEOmoz got an average of 400-500 links from a Techcrunch mention.
Newsvine – if you get to the top, get lots of traffic and links.
Boingboing – similar to Techcrunch.
Fark – not a very serious community.
Engadget, Techmeme, Lifehacker – great traffic.
Yahoo Picks– like site of the day. Tough to get in, but powerful.
Search Engine Land is the perfect viral example. Got hundreds of thousands of links and a PR7 in just months!
Neil Patel – SMM Whiz Kid, is up next.
Defines the rules of social media.
1. No paying for votes.
2. No creating multiple accounts.
3. No illegal content such as porn or hacking cable TV, etc.
He ran experiment and broke all the rules. Submitted article on how to get free pay-per-view TV. Created 30 accounts from same IP. Also paid for votes. Got banned for two hours. Cost money to pay for votes. Not a great strategy.
Says the audience of the SMM networks is a bunch of arragent babies. You mess with them, they spit in your face. They are young and immature. The older audience is high twenties, the audience laughs (Neil is a young’n). The social media network audience hates self promotion. They hate SEOs. Hate bias information. People will flame you if break rules.
If content is great will succeeed automatically. Don’t want to mess with the users.
Neil’s golden rules:
Rule #1: Add tons of friends. Don’t have to be real friends. Add people who have similar interests.
Rule #2: Participate in community. Not just submitting and voting. Leave comments and AIM/IM friends. Message them. Goal is to be a top user. Takes a lot of time.
Rule #3: Use features against them. Use the tools provided such as a feature he shows on the StumbleUpon toolbar.
Rule #4: Create a social brand. Create a memorable brand / screen name with nice icon – branding your user name. People will show you love and recognition across the different networks.
Experimented by spamming his friends including Danny. There is a great feature on StumbleUpon called “Send To” – which will force your friends to come to the site of your choice and is an opportunity to get tons of traffic.
Neil says one should care more about links from community members than from the network domains themselves. A good piece of content can have a Slashdot effect.
Conclusion:
Do what’s ethical. Don’t jeapordize your brand. Think long term. Think big picture. Just like SEO. All about long term strategies. Slides at http://www.acsseo.com/slides/.
Todd Malicoat takes the mic:
Says even the panel is still new to the whole social media concept.
For him, Social Media for Strategic Linking. It’s all about the link baiting.
Benefits for strategic linking with social media: Control over anchor text, body copy, theme, and from trusted sites. Great links. Increases traffic.
Using Squidoo, can link out heavily. Shows his Squidoo page.
With Digg, sometimes you don’t’ get links. Asks what Ron Jeremy and Greg from BOTW have in common – size matters! The size of your brand he means.
Small brand = doorway pages, Large brand = landing pages.
Size matters. Strategize based on how large your brand is. Don’t go fishing with dynamite.
Building reputation neighborhoods – great for reputation management. Build hubs with social media links. Tells everonye to read Graywolf’s tips for controlling the top 10. Sign up for all social networks with your keyword as username. Push a couple links – build a neighborhood. Lots of applications if you experiment.
Recommends Squidoo, Nasymz, Netscape, LinkedIn, Tagalag.
Also recommends everyone look at Bill Hartzer’s list of the top 130 social media sites as a very valuable resource.
Todd brings up a case study of the movie “John Tucker Must Die”. The markerters decided to advertise the Myspace URL vs. the domain because of time issue. Easier to rank a Myspace page than a new domain. Also easier for people to remember it as opposed to the johntuckermustdie.com domain.
Todd recommends we search for “Google Dorks” to see how people find sites using the different query operators, to find treasures.
Testing SMM sites for link value. Is the site indexed? Is the page indexed? Do the pages rank – search for titles – do they come up? Is the theme on topic? Test if it passes link juice by seeing if its indexed and use case studies. Build a nonsense keyword page and see if it ranks and passes juice.
Conclusions: SMM is another tool for linking. Be strategic. Use the strategies and continue to experiment!
Cindy Krum from Blue Moon Works:
Theme – using social media for brand awareness.
Customers demand a higher level of interaction with brand. Social media is fastest way to move brand forward and change image.
Companies need to view this as the new PR due, to the transparency. SMM will triple in 2011 and cost in participating is free. Take advantage of free stuff, SMM is free.
People are influenced by peers when making decisions. Secure your social presense. Research relevant social networks.
Look at the majors, and the niche and vertical social sites. It gets easier every day to create social sites. Many deep niches out there to take advantage of. Social local sites, blogs, forums, and wikis. Identify existing networks, leverage whats already there.
How many profiles do we want to create? How do we decide to drive traffic. Create profile for brands, and products. Starbucks has profiles for Frappacinos.
Secure your social presense. Make people want to be a part of your network and come back. Spend time on design and updated profiles weekly. Goal is to make people return often. Use remote photo hosting to make things easier. There are new services that are central control panels for editing profiles on multiple social sites.
Leverage social site functionality. Use traditional SEO strategies and copywriting. Focus on brand keywords. Interlink brand profiles on main site. Initiate friending campaigns. Go out and make as many friends as possible and show love. Drive traffic to profile using natural search, PPC, PPP, banners, offline, and from your main site. Can pay Myspace to have a featured profile. Send traffic to all your positive press. Participate in forums and groups.
Empower brand evangelists – people who already care about your brand and give them cool stuff like widgets, desktop themes, podcasts, surveys, games, promo codes, and special deals. Profile layouts – many bad ones. Create nice profiles and people will associate with that brand. The dating site True has a profile page where you can create faces, mix music, etc. Can write inside of fotune cookies to post on blogs. TV show lost also has a great theme and page.
Embrace convergence. Leverage exiting marketing efforts. Use profiles to leverage that. Send TV, radio and print traffic to profile pages. Link to profile pages. Use profiles to get feedback – find out how customers feel about you. Encourage them to leave comments. Direct social traffic. Host local meetups, offer coupons, host contents, scavenger hunts. Let people assemble offline communities about your brand. Create a social media section on your site. Promote all the cool stuff giving away on profile.