Social Media Optimisation

Is Social Media Useful?

Everyone is using social media although does anyone really know how useful it is? Twitter’s unique visitors increased from 475,000 in Feb 08 to 7 million in Feb 09, proving how much it really is taking over the social side of the internet. If you’re avoiding Twitter then you’re missing out on a huge amount of potential traffic, and you can see how much traffic from these figures.

Who’s doing Social Media Optimisation?

We have been reading up and looking at some case studies done on businessmen and their experiences of social media optimisation. One man we have looked at took over a farm about 18 months ago and since then has purely been advertising this business online, with a Facebook page and Twitter to promote the business and communicate with their customers.

There are so many small businesses that use social media to advertise their websites and gain a good contact base. Twitter followers may not yet bring in direct sales or a significant amount of sales, but they do bring useful contacts and it’s still too early on to say that sales won’t be bought in.

5 Tips to Social Media Marketing

Target the right audience- as with any marketing method you need to research the different social networking and social bookmarking websites to find the one that’s suitable for you. Each website will have it’s own regular users who are interested in similar products and services, targeting the wrong one will just make you look bad. Recently Gordon Brown posted a video on YouTube but the administrators had to close the comment stream due to the amount of abusive chat- most YouTube users are not interested in politics and Gordon Brown’s people should have known this.
Personalise your message- small business are surviving because they have a much more personalised approach to sales than those larger corporations going for the cheap target, so it’s easier for them to action social media techniques. Make the most of this and post comments straight from yourself on behalf of the company, but not as the company.
Stay Professional- don’t forget that you’re doing this for your business, so don’t post negative or abusive comments about clients or competitors. Potential clients wouldn’t like to see unprofessional comments coming from the marketing department of a business. Use the’ mother rule’- would my mother be offended if she was reading this?
Focus on Customer Service- Social media marketing isn’t about selling the service, it’s a discussion to help users and point new customers in the right direction. Give out tips and advice rather than trying to sell to absolutely everyone, social media wasn’t built as a sales medium but for networkers to talk.
Keep it consistent- It takes a long time to build up a good follower base on places like Twitter and Facebook so don’t give up, and keep posting regularly, users will get bored if you drop the amount of comments.

Social media optimisation is a huge part of search engine optimisation, even though it has only recently come into the industry. If you're interested in starting an SEO project then ensure your SEO agency are going to include social networking updates as a part of the strategic development plan.