Don’t forget your keywords in your Social Media

Most webmasters and (hopefully) all internet marketers know the importance of properly understanding keywords for website ranking, but that nugget of knowledge seems to be forgotten when thinking about and posting on social media channels.

But the keywords are king rule is as equally important in social media, and this is why.

At the moment Google views everything online as if it was a website – in fact in essence that’s all your social channels are.

Take your Twitter account for example – it’s just a page (albeit a long one) of content, same for your Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest accounts etc.

So if Google does see your social streams as a web page element, doesn't it make sense that these also contain your best keywords - just as your web pages do!

So when you post, think carefully about what you want to say and craft them carefully to get your valuable keywords in.

This will ensure that in search these could be more easily picked up by search engines, but also your brilliantly crafted accounts start to show your authority, which will be passed to your website and web pages when you link back to them.

AND like your web pages, please don’t add posts purely to spam your keywords, Google is wise to this trick just as it is with websites and it could lead to a social penalty!

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SEO benefits of Social Media

Most businesses now recognise the fact that social media doesn't necessarily directly lead to a sale, but I know for a fact that it can help that sales process; instead most big businesses now look at social media as having SEO benefits and allowing their website and webpages to gain better rankings than their competitions, but how!

Let’s take a quick look at the benefits that social media could bring your to your SEO.

Social Media in general:

There are a couple of linked reasons why we would want to use social networks in the first place.

1. It allows people to share your information and links with their Friends and Followers 
2. It allows a greater chance for more people to see your brand and your products 
3. You get a spread of profiles and individuals that link back to your site 

Google+:

Specifically Google+ looks good because of the obvious tight integration with Google Search; this benefits you because Google has a good chance of knowing a little about everyone that use its services.

It knows for example if individuals are interested in or an expert in ‘home decor’ or ‘flooring’ because of their Google+ profiles and/or their search patterns and/or their Gmail topics etc – now if you sell flooring and one of these individuals shares or +1’s some of your content (image/URL etc) then Google will naturally believe that your site or specific page is more important than a competitors that hasn't been shared by these interested parties.

Social sites as information hubs:

We also look at social media sites now as information hubs (a bit like mini websites).

If we take the above example about a flooring business and they focus on posting good content about flooring then Google will understand that their Blog, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest account is about ‘flooring’; and as such any links from it back to that site will generate a little more link juice.

The future of SEO and Social Media:

We (the SEO community) also don’t yet fully understand how Google looks at social engagement (individuals sharing social content), but whether it happens now or in the future, if individuals engage with your social content and brand then it can only benefit ranking.

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Get Engaged, Socially Engaged!

Without a shadow of a doubt, a business that is socially engaged online will always get more business than the ones that aren’t; even if they only generate a little more traffic, it’s traffic that they wouldn’t have got otherwise.

But social engagement is more than just generating traffic; it’s also about learning from your market, having conversations with buyers and potential buyers, building a relationship with them, and maybe - just maybe, helping your search engine rankings along the way.

So how does a business become socially engaged?

Here are 6 great ways to become socially engaged.


Do things differently

Think differently – your website might be absolutely professional to the core (as it should be), but social engagement is about having a conversation with your market, and being 100% corporate isn’t always the best policy.

Try relaxing your grasp on corporate speak a little, try having a little fun, talk to your audience in the relaxed way that I’m sure many of them will want to be talked to.

Be prepared to take a well thought-out risk – this will enable you to test and learn. Digital media is ever changing, as a business you need to be flexible and nimble to keep up with it.


Earn your way (by listening)

Listen in social media is really important – remember you’re using social channels to have conversations (not just sell your products and services), so listening must play its part.

Millions of people might be talking about your business, your brand or products and services that you supply; you need to listen to what they are saying so that you can respond correctly (and timely).

Great insights from your market will help you create better value for your market, and therefore better value for your business.


Make social a culture

Don’t make the mistake of sitting one person at a computer and ask them to do social media as well as their current work. Make social a cultural shift within your business by recruiting staff into social roles, report on their activity at least monthly so that everyone inside the business see’s the activity been undertaken and the benefits that are being generated.


Be big and bold

When you start off in social media, it’s easy to fall into the trap that you think no-one is listening and no-one is interested in what you have to say, but they are.

Be bold, talk about topics that are not only important to you as a business but also what is important to your audience. If you provide credit cards or bank accounts then be bold and discuss debt; if you sell mortgages talk about the problem of not been able to keep up with repayments; if you sell software then help people to understand what might happen if that software fails – be brave, be bold.


Creation and Curation

It’s not always about posting topics that you have created in-house or starting your own discussions; sometimes it’s important to comment on other’s work, maybe other similar businesses. Content can come from many different sources, look and listening to what’s outside of your business to see which of it can help you to engage with your market and get the conversation going.


Internal Collaboration

As already alluded to, Social media is a huge role for just one person in a decent sized business; but it is also true that social media is bigger than just one department. Call upon your colleagues in Sales, Customer Services and Support to help facilitate content, topics and discussions; these teams can help provide real-time insights as to what’s important to talk about.


None of this happens overnight, but if you are starting your social engagement journey, consider these points and getting you towards your end game will become much easier.

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The NEW Social Media Strategy - how to get rankings from your social channels

During the last quarter of 2013 I started to change my view on Social Media and the benefits from it to search engine ranking; tests that I was undertaking didn’t really give any credence (improved ranking) to the fact that Google love it when you post and engage with people of social media.

Sometimes there was a improvement in ranking, but constant Retweeting, Liking or Sharing of posts on Twitter and Facebook did nothing to improve ranking.

The majority of people I know in SEO would swear blind that I should see some benefit, but no!  Absolutely nothing! So what’s going on?

On further investigation I noticed that the social channels that saw a jump in rankings contained a sustained stream of related (or themed) posts; could this be the secret!

I tested a little more and indeed, I realised that I definitely seemed to get ranking benefits from accounts and sites that contained lots of themed social posts.

Then, mid January, Matt Cutts confirmed this approach (see my other post here).

What Matt basically says is that where they can get access to profile and posts, Google treats them just like any other website, they will look at the authority that you provide and pass that onto any linked sites.

So the strategy for the use of social media for ranking now seem very clear; view your social channel as a microsite; ensure that you tweet or post lots of themed (related) posts often (ensuring that you add the URL’s that you want to rank for). 

Ensure that your posts contain your keywords (like any website don’t spam them).

Treat your social channel like you would any small website, remember that content is king because you still want people to engage with you and link to your social posts; follow this simple advice and you’ll soon find that main webpage starts to see an improvement in ranking.

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Twitter doesn’t use Twitter and Facebook social signals to rank pages

Matt Cutts (Google's head of search spam) yesterday explained this in a video (see below) that whilst the Google algorithm doesn’t treat social sites any differently to aid (or otherwise) webpage ranking, where they can they do still crawl and index the page like they do for any other website.

What does this mean in practice for website owners and brand managers that currently undertake social media in order to gain improved rankings? Simply don’t stop what you are doing!

Whilst the fact that you are engaging with your market doesn’t explicitly mean that your rankings will improve, some of this engagement will lead naturally to users taking a look at your site and offerings; this traffic is highly desirable.

The fact that Google does crawl and take notice of social channels does mean that a well crafted and themed channel presence could still rank well in the Google index or be seen as having a good amount of authority and any links back to your webpages become more influential in your own rankings.

In the future think about your Twitter, Facebook or Google+ page as being more of a microsite for your business and brand.

Great content

The learning to take from this video is that we should all continue to do what Google have always recommended and that is we develop great content that visitors will want to read and share through their social channels and other web properties.

Future

There is no doubt that in the future things may change, especially as Google become more adept at understand the value and authority that a particular author may have. If for example Matt himself comments on someone else’s SEO themed blog post then it is unlikely to change anything about their ranking; when Google fully understand that the Matt Cutts who just commented on that blog post has some authority in SEO, then it could affect ranking.

In Summary

Continue to do what you do in Social Media, do not ignore the content, don’t expect great leaps in ranking though your social engagement.

The Full Video

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Social Media for Ranking

Top retailers will tell you that Social Media isn’t very good for generating traffic direct from the links that you put in your Twitter feeds, Facebook pages or Pinterest boards; but what it is good for is providing the big search engines with suggestions on your engagement with the social sphere.

If you post lots and people engage with you more than others in your market, then that alone is a good indicator that your pages might need to rank higher than your competitors. That is the REAL value of social media to businesses today.

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The Ultimate Twitter Starters Guide

Setting up and getting started:

• Choose a short username so that users can easily retweet your posts easily without running out of 140 characters
• Ensure that you have completed your profile fully
• Write a short description of yourself and your business 
• Include a link to your website in your description
• You have added a clear picture of yourself/logo
• You have connected your Facebook profile to your Twitter profile so that you can also post tweets to your Facebook page automatically
• Ensure that you can choose which notifications you want to get by email so that you never lose any opportunity for engagement
• You know that you can get a Twitter app for your smartphone and tablet so you can tweet on the go
• You are aware that you can change your profile theme so that it is more appealing to your audience
• You are aware that you can create and manage widgets from your settings menu

Tweeting:

• You are aware that a tweet can only be 140 characters or 130 characters if you include a link
• You know that you can use tools to shrink the URLs you want to include in your tweets
• You are aware that it’s better to keep your tweets shorter than 130 characters so that other users can retweet them and not lose any valuable information

You know what hashtags are:

• You are aware that you have a list of trending topics and hashtags on the left hand side of your Twitter home page
• You are using one or two hashtags for each of your tweets
• You are using trending hashtags in order to raise engagement and get more followers
• You are aware that you can promote a tweet so that more people can see it
• You know that you can add photos and images on your tweets, not just text posts
• You are aware that if you ask in your tweets for people to “retweet” and you don’t shorten it to RT then you have a better chance of getting retweets
• You are asking questions and answering other peoples’ questions in order to raise engagement
• You are aware that you can use tools to schedule tweets for when you are busy (try Hootsuite or Socialoomph)

You know what a direct message is:

• You know that you can only send direct messages to people that you are following and that are following you back
• You are aware that you can schedule direct messages to send to all of your new followers via Socialoomph
• You know that you have to tweet often as your followers’ home pages or constantly changing 

BUT

• You are not sending too many tweets at the same time so as not to flood your Followers streams
• You have checked your analytics and You know when your audience is most active on Twitter and that is when you tweet the most

Following and Followers:

• You are aware that it’s better to have less, but more engaged followers than thousands of uninterested followers
• You are following people that are part of your target audience
• You are aware that you can use tools to bulk unfollow people who are inactive or are not following you back
• You are constantly interacting with your followers:
• Retweeting their posts
• Answering their questions
• Thanking them for retweeting or sharing your tweets and posts
• Favoriting their tweets

BUT

• You are no sending out too many sales messages

Tools:

• You have searched Google and you are aware that there is a plethora of tools that you can use to:
• Manage several Twitter profiles and other social media profiles from the same dashboard
• Schedule tweets and DMs
• Schedule recurring tweets
• Shrink URLs
• Get your Twitter analytics so that you can tweet better

And:

• You are committed to mastering the art of Twitter engagement – and growing your business!

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What can your website learn from Social Media?

Social Media is the internet success story, we all engage with it in some way shape or form, we love the social channels that we have signed up to, they keep us coming back several times a day; but what exactly attracts us to these sites, and what can we learn from them that we can implement in our own websites to keep visitors engaged and coming back for more?

Most social media sites have the same six attributed that make them successful:

They are Fulfilling – in that visitors can easy discover when they can and get immediate delivery of information and actions. Does your website allow visitors to get to what's important to them quickly and understand what they can/should do on your pages?

They are a Rich source of information – all sources of information at your fingertips, no digging around for what's important.  How does your website stack up? Do you supply rich data? Can visitors see content, price, availability, images, reviews, comments etc all on one page?

They are very Open - very easy to easy to sign up and start their fulfillment process; how is your sign up process? Can users sign up with with an email address and password or do you want their life story first?

Participation is welcomed - not only welcomed but it is positively encouraged in many ways - reviews, comments, ratings etc  Does your site see this level of engagement, so you make users feel that they can contribute and that their contributions are worthwhile?

Remixing the data - many social sites mix up their data a little, so in Twitter for example I can easy find other tweets that the people I follow find interesting.  It's yet another example of how social channels are providing a rich stream of relevant data even if it is pulled from different sources.  Do you supply just the data that you can on your site or are you mixing it up a little?  How about providing news from different news channels for example!

Personalised experience – these social sites are learning from individuals interactions and use that to suggest other things that you might be interested in; they know you are logged in, what you have done in the past and what you might like to do in the future - does your site touch any of that?


I'm not suggesting that your website does all of this - but learn from the social media sites that you use and ask yourself if you can take some of the great elements that you love and put them on your site.

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Search Remains First, Social Second For How People Find Websites

In an interesting report by Forrester Research they highlight that the majority of consumers still find websites through natural search (Google, Bing etc) rather than through Social Media (Twitter, Facebook etc); which to those of us that have been around search, SEO and Social Media for more years than we often care to remember doesn't surprise us.

Even the larger Retail businesses who originally set out to capture lots of web traffic from social media have given up on it and instead use social to influence their search engine rankings and thus bring in more traffic through natural search.

Remember that Google loves it when consumers love your brand, in their eyes, if consumers really love your brand then thy probably want to see your in the results when they try searching for you. 

Social channels is a excellent place for Google to try to understand how much love the market has for you, so if you engage with your social media Followers and Friends, Google will pickup this signal and improve your search rankings.

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How to deal with negative comments on social media sites

If you are unlucky enough to find an extremely negative comment on one of your social media accounts (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc).  How should you deal with it?

Even if you have spotted it quickly, then the chances are that other have also seen it; in the case of Twitter, within moments of it been sent it could have been ReTweeted 100 or 1,000’s of times (and I bet that your competitors will jump at the chance to publicise it or capitalise on it in some way).

In any case, a negative comment from a customer or prospect is a negative comment and it needs to be dealt with fast.

Ultimately, Social Customer Service is all about immediately addressing your customers' concerns quickly.  Where possible you should immediately respond with a holding statement to let the complainant and anyone else that see’s the comment know that their concern has been acknowledged and that you are dealing with it.

If you haven’t got all the facts from the negative comment that has been posted then politely contact the complainant asking for more information on the problem.

You should plan to fully respond by the end of that business day, and absolutely no longer than 24 hours later.  Failure to deal with any problems effectively could mean that it goes viral very quickly!

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Killer Social Media Strategies

Social media allows businesses both large and small to have a lot of impact and power, here are just a small number of things that you can do.

1. Q&A's

Social media has been developed to engage with your potential customers and customers alike, but may businesses have no idea how to do this easily.  The best way is to hold scheduled Q&A sessions – let your Followers and Fans alike ask you anything they want about your business, products and services.  You may even quickly discover problem areas or new product ideas; this approach will also do wonders for your brand too.

2. Solve Problems

By doing regular searches for your brand name, product/services or market sector you will quickly discover people who are asking questions on Social Media platforms about things that you should be an expert in. 

Respond to them, answer their questions; don’t answer with your sales hat on unless the question specifically warrant you suggesting your companies services but try to answer with your customer services hat on.

In fact this approach goes beyond traditional customer services and you’ll be seen as active within the wider community; this is huge for your brand.

3. Promotions/Offers and Competitions

You will have lots of loyal Followers/Fans, and it’s nice if you can reward then from time to time for being there for you.  Give special offers, promote events, provide competitions – anything to further your engagement with your market/community.

Give value and you’ll have a Fan for life!

4. Value added links

If you are a business that just provides links to your homepage or your products and services pages then you are missing a huge trick; provide links to useful resources/news items (whether on your site or not); this will continue to add value to your brand and your wider community.

Work SMARTER, not harder!

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Sneaky way to improve your Klout score

This is a little sneaky but it does the job!

Ok so you love Klout, you need to improve your score, to do this you know you need to get people to interact with you but you have no idea how to do it … here’s a great tip.

Simply ask questions 

Pick an account with a large following (Consumer brands are the best ones to pick because they know the importance of responding to Twitter users).

Ask a simple question (maybe where they are based, where can you buy their product, what is the link to their website, what is their customer services email or telephone number etc), it doesn’t really matter what it is, it just needs to be a simple question that will make the brand look like they are helping out a consumer of theirs.

Once you get a reply, as them another simple question immediately afterwards – you should get another quick reply, but Klout recognises this as a communication, and ENGAGEMENT and you’ll improve your score.

Note: There is no replacement for real engagement, use this tactic sparingly.

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Getting more Twitter followers easily

Some simple tips for you to follow to help get more Twitter followers easily.

• Post great content that people love and are interested in. 
• Posting content on trending topics may get you a number of followers that are interested in those trending topics. 
• Use a real photo of yourself might get you more Followers 
• Your Profile is really important, so write it to attract the right followers 
• Follow only the people who you want to follow you 
• INTERACT with people that you want to Follow you. 
• #FF #FollowFriday can help you get Followers from the people that you mention 
• Can you start a Twitter Competition? This will always get you lots of new followers 
• Try a Twitter Q&A session 
• Use popular or trending #Hashtags

Good luck

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Improving your Klout score

If you’re fixated by your Klout score then you have no doubt tweeted like crazy and got numerous Retweets, things are looking up as your Klout score slowly increase.

BUT you’ll find that when you hit a Klout of around 40 then this strategy of tweeting and gaining Retweets doesn’t help you anymore!

So you are keen to improve your Klout further, how do you do it?

There are a couple of things you now need to do, firstly you need get your Followers/Following ratio up; this means that you need to get incrementally more people following you without you following more people.

Secondly, you need to get more people to engage with you, not just Retweeting the stuff you put out but to actually respond to your stuff!

Do these two things are you’ll find your Klout score move up to the 50’s in no time.

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Tweet like a Pro

Take a leaf out of the books of big businesses who know how to keep a news story running and running.

The vast majority of the largest companies in the world have a series of press releases that are so good that every so often they like to send them back out again and for some strange reason they pick up lots of distribution for their brand again.

You can do the very same thing on Twitter.

All you need to do is discover which of your tweets got the best response from your Followers (i.e. were marketed as a favourite tweet by them and Retweeted).

This is a very simple process, all you have to do is point your browser to http://favstar.fm/ and where it says ‘Choose User’, just enter your Twitter ID.

The results page will show you the best tweets that you have EVER sent out; all you now need to do is Retweet the best ones, some of them might need a little bit of Spin (rewording a little), and you’ll end up with more twitter users seeing your tweets easily.

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The easiest way to get someones attention on Twitter

Twitter is great when you finally get noticed by an influencer or business that you want to get your brand or service in front of; but how do you get their attention?

The easiest way is to tweet about their favourite things or to retweet popular past tweets, but how do you find out that they are?

Favstar will allow you to do just that, by simply entering http://favstar.fm/users/their username into your browser you will find out what they like to tweet about and what are their most popular tweets; this then gives you a chance to engage with them on top topics or simply retweet their best tweet (which could have been from years ago!).

If you want to find out what tweets that your target have marked as a favourite then enter https://twitter.com/ their username/favorites

These are very simple tactic that I have used successfully many times.

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Tips for getting more Twitter followers that stick to you!

If you want to get some additional loyal Followers on Twitter then there are a couple of things that you need to do.

Tweet Often – If you want to maximise the benefit of your Twitter activity then you need to be an active contributor to your Followers streams; I’m not just talking about 1-2 tweets a week, but a constant drip of information, news and views throughout the day. To really make a difference you need to aim for at least 10 tweets a day, some of the most popular and influential people can get 30 tweets out easily.

Be of Value – Tweeting what you had for lunch really isn’t going to help get and keep loyal Followers, you need to be tweeting items of interest, and tweets that are based on your real experiences of those of your customers/clients are the most valuable.

Interact – All too often I see people and businesses tweeting a stream of self promotional garbage and they never interact with anyone.  You are on Twitter to build relationships and hopefully turn your Followers into customers or advocates for you, and you can only do this through interaction.  So get engaging, comment on peoples tweets and Retweet often; you will be rewarded for it.

Share – News is great because often it’s something that we all like to comment on, so as soon as you hear something interesting Tweet about it, it’s possible to get a tweet out about a news item before the major news channels manage to get their act together.

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Don’t have much time to check your social media?

Many of us don’t all have lots of hours free to sit in front of a device and check our social media as and when things happen, find new people to engage with and track down those influential people that can make or break your business, so if you can only spare 20 minutes a day what should you do?

There are lots of things you can be getting on with:

Check that Inbox - Ensure that if anyone had contacted you directly through any social media channel ensure that you get back to them within 24 hours at the very least.

Follow relevant people – the sums are easy, the more people you follow the more likely you are to get followers yourself; the more followers you have the bigger the audience is for your message.  Take a look at Klout and Kred as both of these will show you who is influential in your chosen topics and these are the people you should be following.

Do a few directory searches based on your niche and hit the follow button..

Tweet – and tweet often!  Use HootSuite and set your tweets to schedule automatically; HootSuite will then send your tweets out at the best time.  As and when you think of a tweet to send simple compose it and AutoSchedule it, HootSuite will send it out at the right time for you.  You’ll find that you won’t need too many Tweets to fill each day!

Reply – someone has copied you into a tweet or message for a reason, over time you will learn to quickly understand the value in the connections that you have built up and then quickly be able to understand whether entering into a discussion with them is both productive and useful; but like Inbox messages, don’t ignore them!

Following these small tips should take you no longer than 20 minutes a day BUT will provide you with huge benefits.

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Twitter - Remember CRASH!

I know sometimes we all struggle with how to interact with Twitter ….. what should I say? It is worthy of a tweet? Etc etc

Try this simple reminder of what you can do when you sit down to catch up with your Twitter feed.

CRASH!

Comment – look through your stream of activity (read what the people you are following are saying) and make a comment. It doesn’t need to be profound, sometime a simple “Sounds Great”, “We agree.” or “Tell us more.” type comments can start an interaction and potential help build relationships.

Reply – is anyone asking us something or commenting about us, this is your opportunity to reply to their comments.

Ask – don’t be afraid to ask questions of your followers; ask them what they think about relevant topic events or ask them if they have a particular business problem (problems that you can solve with your expertise, products and services).

Share – readers of your tweets are more likely to interact with you if you share content; simple post links to interesting webpages, articles or guides. Posting links to your own website could improve your search engine rankings.

Help – sometimes people in your feeds might be asking for help or assistance, don’t be afraid to comment and provide the help that they are looking for, it will help to give you Kudos. In Hootsuite you can create additional streams that show you who is posting about particular search terms. Use search terms based around your expertise or the products or service that you provide.

If you remember CRASH then you should never be stuck for something to say!

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Infographic: Guide to advertising on Twitter by Alchemy Social

Earlier this year Alchemy Social unveiled an infographic guide to advertising on Twitter.

The brilliant guide looks at how to target the public, what motivates people to become followers, and what enhanced pages should look like.

The key findings were that a massive 94% of people follow businesses for discounts and promotions, 87% simply for fun and entertainment, 79% for access to exclusive content and 69% to follow company news and updates.

The full story can be found here.
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