Search Engine Optimization

Brick Marketing is a media partner of the Social Media Strategies Summit Boston, which will be held at the Hilton Boston Logan Airport on September 20th-22nd, 2011.

The Social Media Strategies Summit Boston is designed for business owners, entrepreneurs, CEO’s, and VPs, Directors, and Managers of marketing, branding, business strategy, customer relations, social media, public relations, online communities, business development, and media sales. The goal is to teach them how to harness the power of social media to further brand reach and impact.

Click here to learn more about the Social Media Strategies Summit Boston!

The Social Media Strategies Summit workshops cover a wide range of topics including:

• How to create and maintain an optimized and personalized Facebook presence
• How to create effective and compliant social promotions
• How to leverage social media in a regulated environment
• Tips for finding and reporting on consumer friendly content through the company blog
• How to create a campaign for a non-profit that delivers
• Driving B2B sales through social marketing
• How to leverage content marketing to generate demand and leads
• And much more!

Keynote speakers at the Social Media Strategies Summit Boston include Network for Good COO, Katya Andresen; Gowalla Director of Business, Andy Ellwood; Roar Media CEO, Geoff Livingston; and We First Founder, Simon Mainwaring.

Check out the Social Media Strategies Summit video!

Click here to register for the Social Media Strategies Summit Boston!

Hopefully by now you know and accept the fact that social media is not going away. Having revolutionized the way we interact online, social media can be an incredibly useful tool for marketers and businesses. However, it’s not enough to just have the Facebook page or Twitter handle. Just existing on a social networking site isn’t worth much anymore, other than a few links to help build a link portfolio. If you really want to make social media work for your business, you have to get active!

Here are 5 reasons it pays to get more involved with social media:

1. Building an online brand
Your online brand is more than just what you say it is. Social media has allowed consumers unprecedented control over a company’s brand. How they perceive your brand and company is the only thing that really matter. Social networking sites are fueled by consumer opinions, thoughts, comments and complaints. If you aren’t active on these sites, how will you know what people are saying about you?

Social networking allows you to humanize your online brand. People want to do business with other people, not faceless corporations.

Social profiles can also rank on their own in the search engines, increasing your online brand presence.

2. Connecting with new, potential customers
If you don’t think your target audience is on social networking sites, you’re wrong. While different audiences use social media for different reasons and to varying degrees, just about everyone at least has one profile. The only way potential customers are going to find you is if you are active. You can’t sit there and hope they just show up.

3. Connecting with existing customers
It takes more money to get a new customer than keep an old one. If someone has purchased your product/services before, don’t let that relationship go to waste! Social networking sites are a great way to stay connected with your existing and previous customer base. You can keep them in the loop about product launches, updates, company news and so forth.

4. Promotion of content generates natural links
It’s no secret that links are the bread and butter of SEO. The more times a piece of your content is shared, posted, liked, Tweeted, bookmarked and so forth, that sends a signal to the search engines that your content is valuable and useful. Both Google and Bing have admitted that social signals impact how well something ranks in the SERP.

5. Increase website traffic from social networking profiles
Your website must always remain at the hub of your online marketing efforts. By choosing to check out your social media profile, a visitor is identifying themselves as your target audience. Your social profiles should encourage that visitor to keep moving through to your website where you can push them to convert.

There are many places online where you’ll have the opportunity to publish a company description (directory listing) or create a company profile (social networking site). Each of these descriptions/profiles needs to relate to one another, keeping the branding and messaging the same. By having a synergy across all platforms, your present a much stronger online brand personality and avoid confusing your audience with different messages.

Watch the SEO video tip here:

There’s often debate between marketing people and financial people at any company. The financial people want hard numbers. They want to be able to measure specific ROI, or return on investment, for any marketing plan that’s implemented. What they don’t understand is that many marketing strategies, besides promotional deals that have expiration dates, often work in the long term. Many marketing campaigns work to build a brand so that the company stays top of mind in the consumer. Many times, this is hard to measure, or can’t be measured at all. This is certainly the case with social media. It’s still a relatively new marketing medium and the right tools to measure its ROI simply don’t exist yet.

The fact that social media marketing ROI is hard to measure is part of what has prevented many businesses to jump on board. Even though it’s a great way to communicate with a target audience, some CEO’s, Presidents, and Vice Presidents are still hesitant to get involved. It takes time and effort to do social media well. In order to implement a social media marketing strategy correctly, it takes hours of the day. While some companies even choose to hire someone to fill a social media specific role, other companies can’t possibly understand the point of spending salary money on something that can’t even be measured.

There are some people out there that argue that it is possible to measure social media marketing ROI, but what they are measuring isn’t really ROI, per se. ROI is a monetary measurement. If I spend “x” dollars, I should receive “x” dollars back in return. Sure it’s possible to measure how many new fans, followers, connections, replies, views, and retweets that a company gets on social media a month, but that’s not really measuring ROI since none of those things specifically correlate with the amount of business or dollars that a company gets.

However, just because it’s difficult to measure ROI, that doesn’t mean that social media doesn’t contribute to the bottom line. It certainly does if it’s used correctly because it’s a great way to build relationships with potential customers, clients, prospects, and other stakeholders. The only problem is that it’s hard to attribute the credit to any one medium. While some believe that the last point of entry should be credited with the conversion, that might not have been where the actual decision was made. Success is usually found through using a combination of efforts. A new client may have read your newsletter, connected with you on LinkedIn, and followed your blog before signing up for services. Which was it that landed the sale? It’s hard, if not impossible, to measure if anything is more important than the other when it comes to social media. Likely, it’s the fact that the company had a presence across all of these platforms that got the attention of the client. Therefore, it’s important to utilize as many social tools that are available to you because you never know what will prompt that final decision to buy your product or use your services.

Social media is sort of like a cake if you think about it. Every month you add new layers on top of new layers really strengthen your image and your brand. What kind of efforts do you like to include in your daily correspondence with your community?

Let’s take a look at some of the online communication efforts that should be happening that might not be right now.

Presentation Sharing: Presentation sharing is one of those things that people don’t pay much attention to but really should. Sites like Scribd.com and DocStoc.com are amazing places to post older presentations you might have sitting around. With the ability to leave links behind not only can you build up your community with the social aspect but the ability to generate some nice links and actually deliver targeted traffic to your website is really there.

Photo Sharing: Are you a business that does many social benefits, functions or fundraisers and you have lots of great photos sitting around? If you do than you should get them out off the hard drive they are sitting on get them into sites like Flickr.com where you can start applying those photos to a more social effort. Maybe you have a business that has machinery or products where you can take photos? For example a car dealership can keep a running log of photos of the showroom, service bays and employees and use those photos in a variety of the photo sharing websites.

Free Giveaways: This one might sound strange to you but if you are a business that has the ability to give something away do it. Post the message on your social profiles along with the variety of websites that offer freebies and free products and watch your community build very quickly. Do this step the right way and you could also generate a great deal of links to your website from other bloggers writing about your freebie.

Everyone seems to flock towards the Facebook and Twitter pages for all their social media marketing efforts but these above efforts are ones that not everyone always thinks about using. Incorporate them into your social efforts and watch your search engine optimization really strengthen over time.