What is SMM?

Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks .Social Media is a shorter top level term that describes the space overall, and covers the activities around social interaction, content, videos, images and audio exposure.

Where to start?
Key pieces to success: definition of business goals, objectives and overall process for execution. The old “fail to plan, plan to fail” comes to mind. While you need to create the roadmap for your online business, you need to decide on what goals and resulting metrics you want to attain.

Social media marketing can help you increase the activity around these top goals:
Conversion and sales tracking
Page views, ad exposure
Website traffic and user behavior
Growing brand awareness
Creating a positive brand association and keeping it there
Business development and a broader customer reach

What to do?
The the social web allows you to interact with others, create and promote content that can get links and viral attraction and you can – with the right strategy – reach key influencers using this medium. We all know what blogs alone can do, and they are pretty search engine friendly out of the box.
Social media involvement is important because this provides foundations for broader and faster mindshare, along with supporting your search engine marketing objectives. Read each point below to get a deeper understanding.

1 – Help others:
It's not about yourself – provide ways to help others instead. This is probably the most important tip in the social media workplace. Say you are building your new profile, make sure to bookmark other useful resources and sprinkle yourself lightly. It’s about “them”, not “you”.

2 – Process:
Prosess and Goals – establish a process and goals for how to get there. It's much like SEO programs that have a process (keyword research, competitive review, content analysis, etc), build out a similar map. Too many companies dive in too fast, with no real plan.

3 – Egagement:
Create (quality) content. While community is Queen in Social Media, quality content is still King, and always will be. Studies show that people are reading much online, but a much smaller group is contributing content. This can mean good opportunities for you.

4 – Position:
Put yourself in front of consumers’ passions. It can and will create a powerful outcome for your brand.

5 – Use a Blog:
You need to setup a blog. Technorati.com is tracking over 120 million blogs now, and growing at a furious pace, and also excluding splogs (spam blogs).

6 – Links out:
Link out to other blogs and websites. Links are what search engines and users make good use of – and search engines would not survive without them.

7 – Videos:
Create a “how to, ” or “top tips” videos and submit to YouTube. YTubeou has wide reach, and you could have millions of people see it. For even wider distribution. In generating all content, make sure to keep #1 rule in check. It’s fine to brand with a URL at the end of the video, but no direct selling. Humor, controversy and weird stuff works very well.

8 – Technorati:
Claim your blog at Technorati. This will ensure you are indexed in their search engines for blogs and updates are broadcast across the network, along with your own blog network updates. This happens behind the scenes from automatic “pings”.

9 – RSS Feeds:
Subscribe to feeds, and use iGoogle, FeedDemon, My Yahoo Web or other favorite RSS readers. Watch for changes , and use Google.com/alerts. Be the first to comment and engage in your topic. First commenters often get more visibility and traction.

10 – Analytics:
Open an account from list below, use your brand name as identifier. This will establish your brand or company name. Then, work with one or two from the list below to start, and don’t go too fast. Look at your web analytics and track referring domains and review traffic movements very often.

11 – MicroCommunities:
Join microcommunities that are relevant to your business: education.com, nowpublic.com, travbuddy.com, gardenweb.com,shoetube.com, yelp.com and care2.com (non profits). It is much easier to have your voice heard in these and similar markets, than trying a post to Digg that may go nowhere. Create highly relevant and linkworthy content, research what others are writing about, and connect with the top players and influencers.

12 – Submit:
Build out profiles over time. If you submit content, make sure it’s useful, unique and that the title of your post stands out. Pick one or two resources to start, and don’t overextend yourself. Some of the top social marketers in the industry spend up to 12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week, but you don’t have to go at it that hard. Make sure to ask friends to vote or comment on your postings, befriend others, but no spam. Make intelligent posts and do not have your company employees post from the same location (IP Address). The submission(s) will most likely be rejected, and worst case, your account blocked or suspended.

13 – Hosting:
Have a good hosting provider. If traffic spikes come, and your server instrastructure cannot handle it, you are lost. Here’s a story and how to deal with it. Hosting can be found here.

14 – Advertising:

Your Top Social Media Starter Resources:
1. Facebook (download toolbar)
2. Twitter *See more below – specific for twitter
3. LinkedIn (tip: use the Q/A section to gain readership and clients)
4. YouTube (toolbar exists,)
5. Del.icio.us (download toolbar)
6. StumbleUpon (download toolbar)

Twitter tools:

Web Browser Plugin: twitterfox
Blog Tools: loud twitter
Desktop: twhirl
Phones: twitterberry (BlackBerry)
Other: tweetscan (alerts, keyword, user search)

You Need Marketing Strategies.

Internet marketing strategies are needed to attract a specific audience to your products or services. Without a good strategy in place, there is no effective way for you to reach the people that will definitely buy what you are offering. You need to find out who your target audience is, what they likes to do, and what kind of problem in the lives of your audience can your products or services solve? When you answer these questions, you will know what kinds of internet marketing strategies you will need to use in order to achieve your financial goals.

Internet Marketing Methods
- Blogging
- Article marketing
- Social networking
- Forum marketing

Take your time to figure out which internet marketing strategies you will want to start with. Learn how each method works before picking one to begin with. For instance, social networking is the perfect way to reach large audiences. With billions of individuals on websites such as Facebook, you can create pages that appeal to the masses. You can then link to your blog in which you provide individuals with information that they can use. Next is article marketing where you provide general information about what you offer and then submit the article to a free article directory in order to link readers to your website. And while forum marketing is the least effective of the internet marketing strategies, it can direct customers to you that you would not have otherwise. 
 
Strategies In Social Networks
Create an attractive page and keep it updated
Create incentives for your followers
Use fun widgets to bring your customers back every day
Be consistent with your update

Social networking will be where you can utilize some of your most effective internet marketing strategies. Some are as simple, while others involve some creativity. It is sometimes necessary to spend money to make money. You may wish to conduct a referral contest so that the person with the most referrals wins a prize. Maybe that prize can be a product or something as simple as an eBook. Use your ideas because it is your unique ideas that will be the most effective.

Be Strategic in Your Marketing, That Gives You?
- Saves money and time
- A better conversion rate
- Can utilize as few resources as possible
- Positively effects your bottom line

You do not want the majority of your website visitors to stay on your site. You need to target your audience so that a higher percentage of the traffic converts into customers. You will find that a targeted audience is cheaper to market to because fewer resources are used and less time is required. Not targeting your audience through effective internet marketing strategies means that you will be marketing to anyone and everyone and this can be money thrown down the tube.

Find the right way?
There are many strategies on web. Choose what will work best for your particular business. Of course, some are free and some cost money, but know that any time you are targeting an audience, you are appealing to those that are interested in your products. This can result in an increase in your bottom line. Most people will not succeed in their business, because they do not have the knowledge that is needed to sponsor 1 to 2 people per day.

Rules of Social Media Optimization

(SMO)

1. Increase your linkability - This is the first and most important priority for websites.  Many sites are "static" that mens that they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront.  To optimize a site for social media, we need to increase the linkability of the content.  Adding a blog is a great step, however there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.

2. Tagging and bookmarking must be easy - Adding content features like quick buttons to "add to Facebook, Twitter", are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we go beyond this, making sure pages include a list of relevant tags, suggested notes for a link (which come up automatically when you go to tag a site), and making sure to tag your pages first on popular social bookmarking sites (including more than just the homepage).

3. Reward inbound links - Is often used as a barometer for success of a blog, and also for websites), inbound links are paramount to rising in search results and overall rankings.  You always need more of them, you need to make it easy and provide clear rewards.  From using Permalinks to recreating Similarly, listing recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you

4. Help your content travel - SMO is not just about making changes to a site.  When you have content that can be portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant sites will help your content travel further, and that in turn, drive links back to your site.   

5. Encourage the mashup - In a world of co-creation, it pays to be more open.YouTube's idea of providing code to cut and paste so you can imbed videos from their site has fueled their growth.  Syndicating your content through RSS also makes it easy for others to create mashups that can drive traffic for your content.

You need always to look for new ideas in Social Media Optimization to encourage even better thinking.  Perhaps we may even see the rise of entire groups or agencies devoted to SMO in the future.

You may also read: SEM vs Organic Marketing

We need engagement in the social age

In these time's we can be achieved with the combination of technology and social media. Today we have an unprecedented ability to connect with vast numbers of people all over the globe. And as more people have connectivity technologies such as mobile devices put into their hands it’s imperative for businesses of all sizes to build a community around their business.

If you define your business community as being composed of three groups of people:

1. The potential ideal customers
2. The current customers
3. The people that will help you spread your message, comment on blog posts, point to you as an authority, and more than likely will never buy anything from you.

Despite what you may learn in school, all three of these groups are of equal importance and should be treated as such.
Your community goes beyond connecting with people on Twitter, Facebook or another social media platform. In fact I’m finding that when it comes to creating engagement with your community these platforms are limiting. You might have their attention for a few minutes at best, but is that engagement?
Meaningful contacts and connections don’t happen overnight. They don’t happen within weeks. It can take months to create these connections, and sometimes these connections never happen. It may be because you’re talking with the wrong people. But that doesn’t mean you should stop doing what you’re doing, it means you need to keep talking with more people until you find the right ones.

Social Media Marketing Strategy

Measuring Your Online Marketing Strategy with Social Media Metrics and Tools

You can approach social media ROI by seeking to determine how well your customers are engaging with you through various outlets.

Social Media Metrics
Your social media strategy success depends on how well your target audience interacts with you. If you want to get a feel for customer engagement using the following key metrics:

Google+: - offers many of the same benefits as Facebook, but with a few new features. Google+ enables you to create circles, segmenting your friend group so that you can designate particular content for particular circles. It also incorporates a video chat feature and content gathering option (similar to an RSS feed). While Google + is still very much in its infancy stage, marketers have already seen great potential for reaching a particular audience with a targeted message.

Google Analytics: - Start monitoring your Google+ account by using Google Analytics to watch Google + generated website traffic as well as clicks and actions.

 Google Alerts: - Setup brand related keyword and phrase alerts and receive a daily report of the overall mentions you receive in a variety of categories f.eks, news, blogs, web, and video.

Facebook Likes: - Determine how effective your Facebook campaign is, the like button is a great place to start. If your customers “like” your page, that means they’re taking the time to read what you’re posting, they’re giving it some thought, and they’re expressing their approval.

Re-tweets: - The re-tweet tells you that your Twitter followers have engaged with your content enough to share it with their friends. Overall, re-tweets are more important than the number of followers you have since they tell you who is engaging with your content.

Overall Mentions: - Keeping track of your overall brand mentions is the best way to determine how well your branding strategy is working for you. Find out what people are saying about your brand using the following tools:

Monitoring your social media metrics along with your SEO effectiveness will give you a good grasp of how well your online marketing efforts are reaching your intended audience.

Social Evolution

The Evolution of Social and Search

A lot of buzz has been surrounding Google’s and Bing’s latest updates to their social search features. Instead of setting real time results from social networks like Twitter and Facebook apart from organic results, both search engines are streamlining search engine results pages (SERPs) by combining organic results with this social context. According to Google, some searches will social context boost the rankings of results higher on the SERP than regular results. These announcements are just further confirmation of the convergence of social and search, and signal the growing importance of social media marketing for businesses.

Noteworthy things at this latest change to SERPs?

Google and Bing have moved away from showing tweets and sectioned off “Liked Results” in the SERPs. Now, the search engines are putting the website front and center, with this social context as a subscript. These social recommendations are still included in the search result, but now they’re a click away, instead of being directly displayed in the SERP.
Search engines are now doing this extra mapping for users by sending them to the correct website, as well as providing the origin of the recommendation (ie. friend’s profile, original recommendation).

- With these social annotations, the search engines are giving users some visibility as to why they’re showing certain results.
- Google’s evolving the way they integrate Twitter results into SERPs
- Google’s SERPs have progressed from an organic result, to a specific tweet from a user within your social circle who mentions a link, and now to a combination of the two: the website result, a link to the friend’s social network profile (e.g. Twitter account) who did the sharing and a link to the original recommendation.

Change for marketers?

This is a confirmation that social media optimization should be an integral part of any company’s search strategy. Getting retweets and mentions on Twitter, ‘Likes’ on Facebook, mentions on Quora and having an RSS feed for your blog are all becoming crucial for today’s online businesses to gain visibility through search engines and social networks. Additionally, this places word of mouth marketing on a much larger scale. As search gets more social, the idea of the social footprint which gives you exponential reach into a follower or fan’s social network just from a simple @mention, RT, Like or follow will have a whole new large-scale reach, and when people share your content, it will show up for their friends across their social networks and in their friends’ SERPs.

You may also read SEO best practices
and Marketing on Smartphones

The Rise Of Social SEO

SEO on social media is the combination of social media and search engine optimization. The term itself is an acknowledgment that the two are no longer separate. Google is working to incorporate social signals into search engine rankings.

This isn’t anything new. Google has been personalizing search results for quite some time. Now it’s going to an entirely new level. In today’s world of social SEO you must be publishing content that is optimized for the search engines AND is shared within social networks such as Twitter and Google+. In Google’s eyes which already measure authority using somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 factors, social shares from others are another indication that you know what you’re talking about. In addition, they are now supporting the rel=“author” and rel=“me” tags which allow you to indicate if a piece of content is authored or about you.

Already in progress, the content you create everywhere is being linked to directly to you. In addition, people’s reactions to that content is also being measured and noted. It has been said that every person is a content producer. Now every person is an authority, or can be.

You may also read: SEO bestpractice
And SEO Powersuite