Social Media has emerged as the new tool for successful marketing of various products. It enables brands to advertise in various countries and thus reach a broad spectrum of customers and consumers. Processes like search engine optimization and social media optimization have made this medium truly measurable. However, many businesses have not yet built up their social media marketing strategies or are still in the process of making it. This is not the point of concern. The main issue is that many people aren’t even aware of the options available to measure the impact of social media on their marketing strategies.

This blog will teach you how to assess visits referred directly by the social media and the role played by searches in the analysis.

Adding Campaign Tracking

It won’t be very difficult for you to create a separate section for visits that are credited directly to your SEO, or to be more precise SMO efforts. However, it will need some attention to execute it properly. In order to measure the impact of your direct SMO efforts, what you can do is add campaign tracking system to URLs posted in social media that revert to at least one of your properties.

You can take for example, Facebook. Before you run the URL through a URL shortening service, make sure you tag your campaign with correct attributes to enable seamless tracking. This campaign tracking can be added to other social media sites such as Twitter, YouTube, etc.  You might find it a little boring and annoying initially but once you get a hang on it, it will become an integral part of your social media optimization activities and will make your social media optimization efforts truly worthwhile.

Once you have put the campaign tracking in the right place, you will be able to track and measure the impact that your social media optimization (SMO) efforts have on diverting users to your website. It will also intimate you about subsequent conversions, if any. The more you put in your efforts, the more accurate the results.

Human Algorithm

Using human algorithms is a good idea to get better real-time search results. Your brand can get better placement in the search engine result pages if you employ human algorithms in your search engine optimization process. Not only it will help you make stronger connections with your current audience, but will also allow you to recognize and connect with potential customers.

Understanding social structure design

You need to figure out how peers of your field are discovering and targeting new audience, and are sharing content with them. Knowing their strategies and delivering content as required by your target audience will make you stay on top. After all, social sharing is all about sharing effective content.

It is better to use pervasive social logins rather than proprietary login systems as pervasive social logins like twitter logins and facebook connect are specifically designed to generate deeper social effects. This will thrust ahead your social media optimization process by attracting a host of qualified visitors and will also give a boost to your social media marketing strategies.

Giving a call to action

A call to action rings a bell in the minds of people and makes them acquainted to content that’s worth sharing. You can incorporate some sharing tools to increase the reach of your content. Moreover, options such as post, re-tweet, like, etc help define and stimulate the response that you desire.

Monitoring activities

Creating activities that entice the users of social media is not enough. You need to monitor them as well. You can monitor the number of shares, number of likes, click-throughs, discoveries, etc and can trigger a greater sharing volume.

SMO and SEO professionals know how sharing content on social networks can radically improve social media optimization of the brand. The kind of impact that these social objects create widens the reach of the brand and provide audiences with the information that they can share with their friends.

Establish a difficult-to-remove shadow of your brand

Try and search for networks wherein your audience is already active. Create compelling and tantalizing social profiles in these networks and let people know what’s there for them. Develop personal relationships with them through production and distribution of quality content.

Social Media Optimization (SMO)

An effective social media optimization includes optimizing the website in a way that all the objects are optimized for traditional and social search. This optimization process has to be based on the keywords defined earlier. Try to define and describe these social objects using different title, tags, description and links. One thing that you should keep in mind is that everything mentioned in this step has to be done in accordance with the methodologies dictated by communities you want to approach, for example, pictures, videos, texts, etc.

Social searches and social media marketing

Recent researches have proved that people have a tendency to share on facebook, yahoo, twitter or any other social media, the stuff they like on e-mails. A synthesis of sharing and social networking can radically improve the social media marketing process.

Catching people’s attention

With attention span of individuals decreasing, it has become difficult for people to pay attention to scrolling texts or texts that spin with blinding pace. This makes it essential for brands to provide their audiences with relevant, credible and attention grabbing information. This can help SEO and SMO professional to enhance the productivity of search engine optimization process.

Attracting new visitors to a website has become the need of the hour for organizations who want to increase their businesses. With the popularization of social media, every organization is trying to make its brand searchable and shareable in various social media. This helps the SEO professionals in the search engine optimization job by enhancing website’s visibility in search engine result pages and giving a boost to their business.

Gigya’s white paper gives a detailed report on the relevance of social searches and their reliance on people’s participation. The report states that search engine optimization and social media optimization is a must for online businesses if they want to earn quality traffic from various social networks.

Sharing pictures, text messages, videos and activities with friends and acquaintances has now become the talk of the town. Through these techniques, social media tries to build a rapport with its audience. It then becomes easy for the businesses to target potential customers as these people start relying on the trusted relationships built through social networks. They watch, read and start buying stuff online. This makes the social media marketing process easy.

Many institutes give top 10 points for a better search engine optimization but this blog will give you an additional step to optimize your brand successfully.

Keywords or key phrases

If you think ‘what’s in a keyword’, then think twice because a small keyword can make or break your business. It may seem insignificant but an SEO professional can’t overlook its importance. Choosing the best keywords or key phrases for social media optimization requires an evaluation of all the keywords that people use or have used to find information in traditional SEO or for that matter, SMO process.

Great website content

If you want your brand to catch the attention of people, then you have to include content that is relevant, timely and is shareable too. Producing and including great content is just a part of brand building. Alluring people to make their friends and followers acquainted to your work is out of the usual run of things.

If you want to strike that pulse and be correct with the timing, then it’s desirable that you come up with relevant content for every network. A great content has the potential to hold the audience and make wider the reach of your brand. Search engine optimization can only divert the attention of the audience to your website. To maintain their attention is the job of good content.

Making the user experience absolutely amazing

If your website is too old to be suited to this modern era, then you need to modify it. You need to make sure that the format of the website is such that it makes it easy for people to share. It’s high time for you to come out of the Web 1.0 format and realize that people want dynamic web content. If you provide them with what they need, you will get what you need. If you make their experience amazing, they, in return, will make your social media marketing experience simply mind-blowing.

According to the ad network Chitika, Google buzz is lying on a death bed and the reason is that it lacks its main element – buzz. The statement holds true when seen from search engine optimization perspective. Even Google’s very own Insights for Search research tool iterated the same story earlier. It highlighted the loopholes in the Buzz system that caused a disinterest among the users. Not only Google’s Insights for Search, but every social media optimization player saw a dwindling interest in Google buzz. Though the program managed to hit the headlines of almost every e-paper, it failed to generate enough fan following.

The buzz on the Google Buzz received a varied feedback. Some people found it good and interesting while many others found it dull and boring. In fact, many SEO and SMO professionals criticized it. Their response compelled the Google team to make some alterations in the way Buzz works. Whatever the feedback was in the initial stages, the real feedback is what is visible today – declining popularity and diminishing interest in the Buzz service.

All we can do is hope for a better future for Buzz. Recalling the early days of other social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, these sites also faced many challenges. But now have traveled a long way and have apparently become dominant players in the field of social networking and social media marketing.

With the advent of various social networking websites, sharing images, videos and text messages with your friends has become a common practice these days. These websites have radically transformed the social media optimization process. It has attracted many web surfers and has served as a medium of advertising, helping in social media marketing of various goods and services.

The latest entrant in the sphere of social media optimization is the Google Buzz. Updating status messages, uploading recent pictures and videos, setting and seeing updates in real-time, sharing stuff publicly and privately is what Google Buzz offers.

The online search targeted advertising network Chitika reports that Google buzz started off very well. Several SMO and SEO professionals observed 1500 searches for Google buzz, the day it was launched. The number was 15 times more than the number of searches for Twitter. Google Buzz actually gave a buzz to the search engine optimization process. However, the process was short lived and started sinking immediately. The Buzz popularity started declining as it failed to provide some new and hot stuff to the users.

Chitika reports that the number of searches for Google Buzz declined rapidly in the following days. On the second day, there were just 580 searches and on the third day, only 147. After this three day period, Google buzz failed to get searches in three digits and finally buzzed off the web searches.

Determining the popularity of a tweet is an embryonic algorithm that will take a little more time to actually come to practice. Several SEO professionals find it difficult to locate twitter’s most popular tweets on all search engines. However, if you include some popular words or phrases in your searches, you would probably have better search results.The only problem is that you don’t get popular tweets for these popular phrases. For example, if you try to find information on sports teams like mariners, on a popular search engine, you would get it in a minute’s time but if you start searching for information on sports team like islanders, you may not see popular tweets. Much depends on processes like search engine optimization and social media optimization.

Another important thing that this new search result display of Twitter does is that it rewards the most popular tweets more than the most recent ones. Many SMO professional argue that giving a two-tabbed approach to twitter search results is a better idea as these two separate tabs, viz, most popular tweets and most recent tweets, can give a clearer picture to the user, making the search process simpler and social media marketing process effective.

Twitter boasts of fighting spam more effectively than other social networking sites. This gives a reason to continue making the most recent results as the default search option.

Social networking sites have given a new life to the offspring of search engine optimization, that is to say, social media optimization and social media marketing.

One of the recent entrants in the field of social media marketing is twitter. The search results shown on Twitter help SEO professionals in properly executing the search engine optimization process on the website.

Twitter’s search results have undergone a drastic change in the recent past. The change is quite evident, at least to people who have used the search column on Twitter.com or search.twitter.com in past weeks. The search results in Twitter now show up to three most popular tweets placed above three most recent tweets.

Apart from the tweets, the search results also display the time of posting and the number of times it was re-tweeted. The new search display suggests that showing this information helps determine the popularity of the tweets.

Reality technician Taylor Singletary explained various web developers and SMO professionals about what determines the popularity of a tweet. He said that it is time to make real-time search even more valuable. This can be done by following simple steps such as sprouting the best tweets on a particular topic. However, you have to pay extra attention to what you choose as your topic. The next thing that is to be considered is that ‘how recent the tweet is’ along with the ‘interactions’ that go on those tweets. In other words, you have to analyze the profile of the author and count the number of times the tweet has been replied to, re-tweeted, or added to favorites.

Continued from Part 1

3. Choose the Correct Social Platform to make your campaign ‘Viral’ – The final step would be to identify the optimum social platform like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or MySpace to finally get your campaign going live on them! Right now the three sites that seem to be driving the most traffic are Digg, StumbleUpon and del.icio.us, respectively.

Take some time to understand the focus of your site. It’s often better to create campaigns driven towards one social media site rather than create one campaign and blow it over all over the Web. For example, if you’re looking for links for your new website, submit to Digg. If you’re looking to create some sort of viral marketing campaign for your established site, MySpace might be a better option! Follow relevant groups, pages or communities and use incentive programs to invite relevant people to your page or community. Link your page or group by creating worthy content that can be accessible by users from other relevant pages on these social sites.

Once your SEO company is able to optimize for the above 3 steps, it’s a done deal for your SMO campaign to prosper, attract and convert more users turning your SMO campaign into a more viral one & this is when you would realize that Traffic Attainment Phase is indeed, ‘The Tipping Point’ in any search engine marketing campaign.

I think it makes sense to drive traffic from the Facebook ad. campaign to a Facebook page where you can get them to sign up rather than to a website that will hard sell a product. My logic for this – A Facebook user is casually surfing and networking and is not actively scouting around for a product or service like a search engine user that we can target through SEO or PPC campaigns. So he or she is still in the nascent stages of the buying cycle. Keeping this in perspective, “Get them interested and keep them informed should be the mantra”!!!