COGO Interactive

Archive for the ‘social media’ Category

2012 is finally here, which means you have a clean slate to build an improved social media strategy that will better benefit your business in the coming months. Here are some things to keep in mind when constructing your strategy for this year:

Don’t only promote your own stuff. No one wants to listen to you talk about your product or service incessantly. Remember that social media issocial before all else – you can talk normally and share other content while still being informative and helpful about your business, and it will make you seem more like a real person.

Do answer people who message you. Communication is important. People remember when they are ignored, and they also remember when they get a prompt response. Which way do you want to be remembered?

Do train your employees on the company culture before giving them social media access. There’s no better medicine than prevention, so to avoid embarrassing social media disasters in your business, make sure each employee fully understands your social media guidelines, and what image the company is trying to convey.

Don’t send auto-DMs. Nothing says “we don’t really care about you” like sending the same automatic message out to everyone. Take the time to write your direct messages personally, and avoid sounding like you’re quoting from a form letter.

Do follow people with whom you’re engaged in conversation online. If you’re talking to someone online, you can assume they talk to others, as well. Use this to your advantage – follow people you’re engaged with and watch your own network grow.

If you need help developing a strategy, please call me at 703-885-8406 or email us at: info@cogoresults.com.

Over the past few years, online marketing, and especially social media, has developed into a situation where there is less “businessy” talk, and more real human interaction between businesses and customers. Spouting slogans and pasting logos everywhere is no longer the best way to get customers – you have to have actual conversations with the people you are marketing to, and let them know that they’re dealing with real humans, not some corporate machine.

That said, as a business owner, you still want to draw a line between who you are in your private time, and who you are as the social media face of your business. If you have someone else managing your business social media accounts, you want that person to come across as personally open, without dragging the sordid details of their private life onto your company’s Twitter stream. Finding that balance is important, not only in terms of appealing to your audience, but also in order to avoid scandals and getting attention for all the wrong reasons.

Today’s consumer audience is a lot more tolerant and even expecting of a very personal approach to online marketing than the audience of five years ago. These days it’s okay to talk to people on your Facebook page as if you were talking to a friend. People understand that there’s a real human typing the words in, and they expect you to speak to them like humans. Whereas before you might have restricted social media content to company promotions and essential information, now it’s okay to talk to people about how beautiful the weather is or how much you’re enjoying an event that’s happening in your city.

It’s important not to go too far, though. While your customers want to know you’re a real person, they don’t need to hear about your digestive issues or your frustrations with the in-laws. Keep any personal talk light and on the surface. Think chit-chat more than a heart-to-heart. Don’t forget to mix any personal observations in with at least an equal amount of company-related updates – it is a business account, after all. But of course you can keep the tone of the business updates quite personal, to remind your audience that it’s all part of the same package. Once you find the balance of personal and business that works well for your company, stick with it and watch your social media following grow.

If there’s one thing this year’s Google updates have taught us, it’s that we can no longer rely on raw numbers to tell us how well we’re doing when it comes to social media and SEO marketing. The Google Panda update back in February was a pretty big wake-up call that simply having a lot of content and attracting a lot of links wasn’t enough to stay high up on the first page of search results. Counting fans, followers, and incoming links used to give us a good idea about how our campaigns were going, but as Google and other search engines move toward more engagement-based algorithms, it’s up to us as marketers to respond appropriately.

The key, of course, is not to think of SEO as a set of techniques to trick Google into ranking your site higher. The whole point of the Panda update is that Google now thinks more like a human site visitor, and that’s how you have to think, too. This means that you have to put yourself in your target customer’s shoes – if you were visiting your business’ web site or social media profile for the first time, what sort of features or content would immediately make you want to come back again and again?

This emphasis on engagement is something we can expect to grow over the next year, as search engines give more attention to the social aspects of how internet users determine quality. Engaging with customers and potential customers, having someone on hand to answer questions, and providing relevant and up-to-the-minute content are all going to be increasingly important for the SEO and social media strategies of 2012, and it’s not likely ever to head back the other direction, where spamming your own site with keywords could give you a high ranking that wasn’t necessarily indicative of how good the site was.

That doesn’t mean that you should ignore keywords entirely, of course – saying the right things in the right places will always help attract an audience. The difference lies in how you approach that audience once you have their attention. Quality engagement matters now, much more than ever. Getting in the habit of communicating effectively with your target market, which has always been a good practice in the world of traditional business marketing, is now equally important in the world of search engine algorithms.

When we talk about SEO and search engine ranking, the automatic assumption is that we’re talking about Google. While it’s certainly true that Google is the most important and influential search engine at the moment, and possibly for the foreseeable future, it’s also important to remember that Google has other things besides search in its sights. As Google integrates other features under the umbrella of its brand name, other search engines with more of a single-minded focus may be stepping into the spotlight, and if you’re thinking about the future of your SEO strategy, you might want to keep other search engines in mind.

There was a time, perhaps even recently, that SEO experts would laugh if you suggested you might want to optimize a site for Bing ranking, but they’re not laughing anymore. Bing came out of beta a few weeks ago, and although it is not going to come anywhere near the market share of Google anytime soon, Microsoft has released a statement saying that they are prepared to inject the necessary funds into assuring that the public sees what Bing has to offer as an alternative to Google.

Whereas Google is heading toward a more social experience for its users with features like social circle testimonials, Bing is aiming to be more task-oriented than people-oriented. Google’s algorithm is constantly being modified to give increasing weight to results from social media sources, but Bing’s algorithm has evolved to give priority to location-based authoritative sources. In other words, if you’re conducting a search from Australia, Google will be more likely to bump up results from people in your Google+ circle, whereas Bing will assume you want results that are local to your area, from official sources.

As Google keeps fine-tuning how it ranks search results, this is leaving open niches where other search engines can step in and do similarly focused searches with different priorities. Over time, this could lead to a situation where Google is the search engine people turn to for, say, product reviews, but Bing is the one they try for finding a local business, and so forth. Even though that sort of evolution will take time, and may even go a completely different direction, it certainly makes sense to keep other search engines in mind when forming a comprehensive and forward-thinking SEO strategy.

Believe it or not, it’s already December, and if you haven’t already started thinking about how you want to modify your social media, SEO, blogging, and other aspects of your online marketing strategy for the coming year, now is a good time to get started.

Obviously predicting the future is out of the question, but you can easily see the trends evolving in things like search and engagement strategies, and make some projections for how you can stay slightly ahead of the curve.

In terms of SEO, things like page rank and linkbacks will become less important than other factors. Google in particular is starting to use more human-based feedback to determine the importance of sites. This means that providing quality, relevant content will be more important than ever – not for your ranking, but to keep your audience happy so that they improve your ranking by giving you good feedback. While it may seem that this is going to be trickier than simply relying on keyword saturation and links, in the end it will mean better quality for both searchers and the businesses that are competing for ranking.

In the social media arena, the big question is what’s going to happen with Google+. Despite the fact that you can find plenty of experts claiming it’s the Facebook-killer, Google+ still hasn’t managed to gain even half of one percent of the social networking market share, whereas Facebook still enjoys a hearty two-thirds of the entire market. That said, remember there was a time when MySpace enjoyed a similar heyday – just because a site is dominant for a long time doesn’t mean it won’t crash eventually. Facebook has been slowly losing ground, but opinion is still mixed as to whether Google+ is poised for a takeover.

For those who place a lot of importance on their business blogs, it’s important to note that Google is rewarding fresh content more than ever. So, if have been the kind of blogger that sacrifices quantity in favor of less frequent but longer posts, you may want to start balancing things out with shorter posts that get posted more often. That’s not to say that you’ll benefit from filling up your own blog with irrelevant content – remember that repetitive content will hurt rather than help your ranking. As with everything in a marketing strategy, you’ll want to keep things fresh and concise in your business blog in 2012.

This week Google finally announced that it was allowing businesses to create Google+ Pages for their brands. Since then there has been a lot of opinion in both directions about whether or not the pages are worth the trouble of signing up, and there are a few things that businesses need to keep in mind when considering a Google+ Page.

If you’re going to do it, do it now. Even if you’re not planning on using your business Google+ Page right away, if you think you will want one eventually, you should go ahead and claim it now. At the moment, Google is not requiring any kind of verification in order to claim a page name, so basically anyone can sign up with any brand name. If you want to reserve your name, it’s first come, first served.

You will not be able to run contests. Unlike Facebook’s business pages, Google+ Pages do now allow any kind of promotions or contests to be hosted on the page. This may change in the future, of course, but for now if the main purpose of a page for you is to run promotions, you’ll find that Facebook is still the best tool for your needs.

It’s a good SEO decision. Remember that this is Google we’re talking about – everything you do on your Google+ Page will be strongly integrated with search results. Your Google+ business posts will no doubt help your ranking tremendously, and of course the more fan engagement you can get going on your page, the better.

Hangouts equal conferences. Google+ Hangouts was initially a way for people on the network to have video chats with each other, but now that businesses are getting in on the action, this pretty much amounts to the ability to have video conferences directly from your Google+ account, which is a nice bonus.

It doesn’t work like a Facebook page. One of the things people new to Google+ are complaining about is that it simply isn’t as intuitive as having a Facebook page. Users are reporting problems and confusion with the signup, as well as issues dealing with a user interface that isn’t quite as friendly as Facebook’s.

Clearly the jury is still out on what sort of impact Google+ Pages will have for business, but there’s certainly a lot of buzz right now, and only time will tell if this social network ends up being the Facebook-killer is was hyped up to be.

You probably already have a strong SEO strategy for your company’s website, and of course that’s important. Providing regular doses of fresh and relevant content on your blog, for example, is a great way to keep search engines interested in your site, which will in turn drive traffic to your business.

You probably also have a social media strategy in place, doing your best to engage your target market in a meaningful way across one or more social networks. You may have a Facebook page for your business, a Twitter account, or a YouTube channel, for example.

With Google’s recent announcement that it will now start indexing comments on Facebook, the intersection where SEO crosses social media has just become a lot bigger and more complicated. In the past, Google had trouble indexing comments from third-party JavaScript services like Disqus and Facebook comments, but now that the technology barrier has been breached, comments from those services are beginning to show up as indexed content on Google.

So what does this mean for the future of your SEO strategy? It’s hard to tell at this early stage, but certainly you need to be aware that there will be some changes. Many SEO experts are saying that indexing Facebook comments can only be good for rankings, but others have pointed out some potential problems.

For example, Google’s policy of penalizing for duplicate content may be an issue for those who have Facebook commenting activated on their blogs. When you post a comment on a blog via Facebook comments, it shows up not only on the blog in question, but also on your own Facebook profile, thus opening it to the possibility of being indexed as duplicate content. Multiply that by however many comments your blog is getting, and you see where this may be a problem.

However, there’s also the issue that posts with a lot of comments and user interaction do tend to rank higher than posts with no comments. With Facebook and Disqus comments now being indexed, this could spell a huge boost for some blog owners.

There’s no way to predict yet exactly how this new Google indexing ability will affect your particular SEO strategy in the long run. No doubt some businesses will be affected more than others in one direction or another. The key right now is just to be aware of the changes happening on search engines, and keep an eye on your analytic tools to see if any clear differences are emerging.

Sometimes in the world of social media, it’s easy to get caught up in the idea that a greater following equals greater success for your business. So many people focus on “getting the numbers up” – increasing Twitter follower numbers, Facebook fans, YouTube channel subscribers, and so forth. However, there may be a sobering wake-up call if you manage to get your following to snowball somewhat, but aren’t managing to convert those followers into customers. As so many social media marketers can tell you, just getting the following isn’t enough – those numbers don’t mean anything unless you can also engage with your audience in an effective way.

If you have reached this realization after having already built up your follower numbers, there may be some backtracking involved if your method of growing a following has been somewhat indiscriminate. These days, getting people to become fans on Facebook or Twitter isn’t that hard, if the numbers are all you’re concerned about. But will those people necessarily be interested in what you have to offer? Will they tell their friends, or more importantly, their own social media followers?

When you seek people out on social networks, put some effort into ascertaining whether you are looking in the right places. Not all followers are equal – it’s better to have ten followers who really get your message and want to share it and engage with you, than a thousand followers who couldn’t care less about your company or what you have to say. There is a common misconception that having a high follower or fan count on a social network will in itself drive more business to you, because people will see the fan count and be impressed by it. But these days, so many people have a high fan count, it’s impossible to judge quality on that criterion alone, and your potential customers are smart enough to realize that.

Also, even if you were able to impress anyone simply by having a high follower count, getting them to come see your social networking profiles in the first place requires a driving force. This is where that follower count comes in handy, if you’ve played your cards right. A small army of people who believe in you and are willing to speak and retweet on your behalf is worth so much more than a large army of people who don’t even notice you’re there. Engage with your following, no matter how large or small. Otherwise, there’s no real point in having them.

It happens even to the best of us from time to time – something thoughtless, inappropriate, or downright dumb gets said on a social network, people react, and next thing you know you’ve got a big scandal on your hands. In the context of a small or medium-sized business, even a minor uproar on a social network can spell big problems for you in terms of unhappy customers and a dip in sales. Just like in every other aspect of business, mistakes will be made from time to time on social media. Even if you’re extremely diligent with your social media policy, there’s not really anything you can do about the fact that people are human, and sometimes they say damaging or offensive things.

What you can do, however, is make sure you have a plan in place to deal with issues as and when they come up, so that you can handle any mistakes quickly and efficiently, with the minimum amount of damage. As is often said, the best cure is prevention, so having a clear and concise social media policy in the workplace is essential. The more people you have working with you, the more comprehensive and specific the policy has to be, as you are dealing with a variety of personalities, all of whom may have different interpretations of what “inappropriate” or “offensive” means.

Even if you’re a sole proprietor, though, sometimes you might be your own worst enemy. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen people posting on Twitter or Facebook who were clearly drunk, angry, upset, or a combination of the three. It’s one thing if you want to do that on your personal accounts, though I still wouldn’t recommend it. On your business accounts, it’s absolutely unacceptable.

If you do wake up one morning and find that you (or an employee) did the unthinkable and said something inappropriate on a social network, don’t just sit there and hope no one noticed. Delete the offending post immediately, and issue a public and very sincere apology. Trying to talk your way out of it or accusing your audience of not being able to take a joke is not a smart move. The sooner you can apologize and make amends, the better. Most of all, use the experience to learn how not to play the social media field, and do your best to be a model social network citizen in the future.

Ten years ago, internet marketing was much simpler than it is now. You had a website to promote your business, and that’s exactly what it did. It was basically an online brochure that told your potential customers what you would provide for them, and gave them all the contact details to reach if if they wanted to do business with you.

These days, a successful internet marketing strategy is about so much more than just having a website, and indeed your website needs to be so much more than just a glorified business card. Internet marketing involves things like search engine optimization, social media networking, pay-per-click, and article submissions.

If all these aspects of internet marketing make your head spin, never fear, you can certainly hire a consultant or marketing assistant to help show you how to do things. Nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt to become familiar with what’s going on so that you can usefully analyze the results of your marketing strategy and learn what works and what doesn’t for your business.

Probably the most hands-on aspect of internet marketing is social media. As the name implies, you will have to spend time connecting with your audience, which means more than just a one-time effort. Social media is used not only to seek your target market, but also to be there for your customers so that they feel they have a relationship with your business. This means you will have to be on hand, preferably on a daily basis, to answer questions and provide guidance.

Search engine optimization means streamlining your website so that popular search engines like Google rank your site higher than others in the same niche, thereby increasing your site’s traffic. SEO is a delicate balance of quality content and keyword usage, as well as integrating your social networking accounts.

Pay-per-click is like traditional advertising in that you pay for ad space, but the fee scale is set up on a per-click basis. In other words, the more people that click on your ad, the more you pay.

Article submissions work by putting information about your site and your business in as many places as possible. You can list articles about your business in articles directories all over the web, increasing your overall exposure to the people who are looking for the service or product you provide.

Combining all these aspects of internet marketing can be complicated, but you’re likely to see positive results that will encourage you to learn and try even more ways to get your message out there and bring customers your way.