Social Media: Just the Tip of the Iceberg
Back in January, I wrote an article about the science, art, and magic of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In that article I discussed a number of things you could do to your site to improve its search engine ranking. Now, all these months later, I’m writing this follow-up to explain how social networking sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, can further help your endeavors.
We recently met with a Search Engine Marketing firm, Site-Seeker, to discuss an event we’re co-hosting next month. Our conversation flowed to social networking and how we needed to do more to support our marketing efforts. Curious about how we could utilize social networks as a marketing tool and a search engine ranking booster, we arranged for Site-Seeker to present to our management group a seminar on this subject in preparation for our October 15th event.
Let me first discuss a few of the social networking sites and how they may or may not be helpful.
MySpace. Don’t spend your precious time here, MySpace is a wasteland of disastrously hideous personal webpages. A true blight on the digital landscape of the Internet.
Facebook. Primarily a business-to-consumer opportunity, creating a fan page for your company can help generate positive word-of-mouth and increase your authority (more on authority later), as well as provide an avenue to advertise events and other business messages. Facebook is best for those businesses targeting consumers.
LinkedIn. A business-to-business opportunity, this social networking site is best for businesses targeting other businesses. This site provides a professional environment to network with other professionals and businesses in your line of work, as well as those businesses seeking services you provide, or businesses providing services you need. This site can be used to increase your authority and to make valuable business connections.
Twitter. A runaway success, Twitter has turned into the 900lb. gorilla of social networking overnight. This service lets you send out short messages (up to 140 characters, called “tweets”) to the “world.” If you’re lucky, one or more of your followers will like your tweet, and “retweet” it to their own followers, creating a ripple effect of information dispersal. This is a powerful and immediate social network.
YouTube. A bunch of weird, wonderful, and wacky videos typically created by everyday “normal” people. YouTube is a good avenue to share videos advertising or demonstrating your services. Personally, I still consider YouTube as entertainment, not a marketing opportunity (unless you’re selling entertainment, I suppose).
Social Networks Don’t Directly Help with SEO
At our meeting with Site-Seeker, we focused on Twitter with a secondary emphasis on LinkedIn. For our needs, LinkedIn, as a professional social networking tool, allows us to reach a business audience. Twitter, on the other hand, lets us instantly connect with our audience and more speedily increase its size. Facebook is not as useful for us, but if you’re trying to reach consumers, this is probably a better choice for you than LinkedIn. Either way, Twitter is a good place to start.
Normally, to improve your SEO ranking, we advise having other relevant sites link to yours. This is by far the absolute most important aspect to search engine ranking. It’s also the most difficult to achieve. So, wouldn’t it be helpful then to set up pages for your company on these social networks and post links to your site? Sadly, no.
When you post a link on these social networks, the networks specially inhibit search engines from following that link. This means that a search engine won’t see the links to your site from these social networks. Therefore, the links do not directly affect your ranking. So, what’s the use of the social networks, then?
Networking, silly! These social networks provide a channel directly to your audience. As your audience grows, so does your authority. And when you are the authority, you become the go-to resource when your type of services are needed.
With Twitter, you begin by following other people in your line of work (to “follow” in Twitter means to subscribe to that person’s tweets). In turn, those people will probably follow you. Continue to build your follower network, but try to follow fewer people than there are people following you. Further, post regularly. On occasion, it’s likely that someone following you will retweet something you tweeted. The retweet then gets sent to all of that user’s followers, thus increasing your audience and possibly bringing you new followers. This process goes on and on as you continue to build your followers and authority.
I see this as less search engine optimization, but more marketing. In the case of Twitter, perhaps we should call it Twarketing.