The Social Marketer

One, if you’re not making Google the focus of your search engine optimization efforts, you’re making a mistake! According to Hitwise Google’s share of search now is at 69.17%. Whether this number is real or not, (some think it’s low!) it’s clear that that at least for the moment, the big G is really the only show we’d like to attend! Yahoo hovers just under 20%, while MSN has tanked to about 5%.

The other item is that Google apparently is toying with the idea of ranking your searches. This is part of a Google Labs experiment, and it’s really not clear just what their eventual aims may be, but the output does look very Digg-like! Take a look at the article on TechCrunch and see for yourself!

If you haven’t considered yet what your social bookmarking strategy is, or what it might be, or even if you need one, then here’s a few things to think about. A good social bookmarking strategy is essential on many levels, not the least of which is that if you do this wrong, you’ll find yourself locked up in the social bookmarking pokey in short order! (Don’t ask me what sites I’m banned from: wait for the T-shirt!)

Even the term “wrong” is relative, because each of the social bookmarking services is a bit different. What is cool at Mister Wong may be taboo at Digg, and vice versa. Certain subjects or topics are not in favor at certain sites, and you find this out the hard way sometimes. Anyhoo, here are a few things we’ve found that are usually not what you might consider a best practice:

• Promoting your own content - A big no-no on sites like Digg. Many of lesser elite sites don’t mind so much, but for the most part, you’re much better off letting your friends or network Digg, Stumble or otherwise discover your site.
• Multiple accounts - This is a tactic used by people who wear dark color hats! They register many accounts, use proxies, automated posters and other means to “game” the system. This one is against most all TOS of any of these sites.
• Duplicate content - Not in the sense you’re probably thinking. What I mean is the use of the same exact wording, headlines and text at every social bookmarking service you use. Mixing it up a little is at the very least a way of testing different headlines, anchor text and keywords. At best, it creates even more unique content with just a small tweak. 
• Frequency - Social bookmarking every single solitary post you make is not only not necessary, but can be looked upon askance. Bookmark your best stuff. What I like to do is rotate where I bookmark, kind of spreading the wealth, so to speak.
• IP addresses - If you do a lot of bookmarking for clients or friends, be aware that most of the bigger services, like Digg, monitor your IP adddress, and will come down hard on you of they suspect you’re trying to spam the system. Remember, moderation, and not your own stuff!
• Social Bookmarking AutoPosters - These software tools are an accident waiting to happen to your rankings.  A bunch of bookmarks with the same text, timestamp, and IP address all pointing to your site? Hmmmm….
• Google Slap Rumors - There are rumors rampant that Google may come down with one of it’s infamous “slaps” soon, this time targeting all the spam associated with social bookmarking sites. We shall see…

Those should give you plenty to obsess about over the next few days! Seriously though, a sane, well thought-out social bookmarking strategy can be implemented and should be. Just make sure you’re doing your level best to use the services the way they were intended to be used. The real winners when this all shakes out will be the people who’ve taken the time to create a following that will naturally bookmark and otherwise vote for their posts. This after all is the essence of the social web.

~Keith

 If you’ve looked at the size of the task and weren’t inebriated at the time, then outsourcing your social media marketing, or at least portions of it, is really the only sane solution to cover the numerous items that need to be performed on a regular basis.

Whether you choose to outsource it to your staff, freelancers or a social media marketing services firm, you need to be very clear with all concerned as to just what you want from this, to avoid wasting time and money.

Let’s take a quick inventory of all the things you may want to have outsourced, and the best way to go about it.

Content – If you have articles, blog posts, social posts or any other type of market-specific content written, you’ll want to be very careful as to who produces it and how well. If they are writing for you main site, obviously you need this to be top-notch. One popular way to do that these days is to have “guest bloggers”; others you have developed relationship with in your field whom you trust and are satisfied with the caliber of their writing, and you trade services, or in exchange for links.

If the writing is for a feeder site, blog, or for some other microblogging platform, then it may not be as crucial, particularly if your name is not on it. Still, it’s a best practice not to scrimp on your content writers as they represent your site, products and you to the world! You can outsource this type of work outside the US very cheaply, but you’re likely to notice, as will your visitors.

Site Building – If you have someone building web properties for you such as Squidoo lenses, Hubpages, Blogs this can be done fairly easily by posting your needs in places like Elance, Sitepoint or any of the other webmaster hangouts. Make sure you get what you want; for instance if you want certain keywords to appear as titles, URLs, links etc., make sure they are diligent about doing this. Also, if you are having them construct an interlinked network for you, do yourself a favor and make sure they know how to do that as you want it.

Link Building – Outsourcing having someone build links for you is one of the best uses of outsourcing, as it will have a direct positive effect on your site. If it’s done correctly, that is! Whether you task someone to do blog comments, social posts, social bookmarking or networking or article submissions, make sure they not only know how to code your links correctly for the sites that require HTML, but also that they understand how to vary your anchor text, collect RSS feeds, and ping your pages.

Social Bookmarking & Networking – These require special attention, as you not only don’t want to be accused of spamming any of these sites; you want to make it as effective as possible. Making sure not to overdo, collect RSS feeds, link-dropping where appropriate, trying to hold coherent conversations within your niche if called for; these are just some of the things you’ll want your outsourcer to pay attention to.

RSS Feeds and Videos – These are great areas to outsource as they take so much of your valuable time. There is software available out there that will greatly speed things up, and you can provide this to your staff or outsourcer.

Hiring A Social Media Marketing Services Firm - If you don’t have the time to manage this all yourself and you’d just like to get it done, then this may be your best option. Typically they will have all the pieces in place, and you won’t have to do much except provide them with the site or sites you like promoted, and a few other pertinent pieces of information, such as keywords, social accounts you may already have, and preferences etc. A good social media marketing service can save you scads of time and work, and put your site on the map.

However you end up doing it, outsourcing your social media marketing just makes sense!

Another of my favorite and very useful social marketing tips is to make sure you ping the pages that are promoting your content. What this means is if you do article marketing, guest blogging, video submissions or any other type of content that you’ve created that contains a live link back to your site, you’ll want to ping that page with your favorite ping service.

Many times we submit an article and think that’s it. It just takes a minute to do this and it can speed indexing up considerably!   

Choosing the specific web properties you’d like to implement for your social media marketing strategy can be a confusing and time-munching matter. There are literally thousands of Web 2.0 sites out there, each purporting to be exactly what you need. So, as I said in a previous post, you need to be really clear about what it is exactly you’re after. Then you have a basis for choosing dance partners!

First, you need to be pretty plugged in if you’re doing this yourself. many times people come to social marketing thinking they’ll just get themselves a Facebook or MySpace account and everyone will simply rush right over after they see they’re there. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Just the fact you’re reading this is a great start, and there are many more voices that can shed light on the ever-changing landscape of social media. For me, I start my day by logging into my Google Reader and checking out the feeds of the various sources I listen to, and I have subscribed to a few! (You want to limit this to whatever number doesn’t keep you glued there all day!)

Now that you have an ongoing education in what’s hot and what’s not, you can begin to choose. Remember not only your goals and objectives, but what exactly will be the return for that investment? You can spend months building up thousands of friends and followers on some of the social networking sites, but if your goal is search engine traffic then you need to know that Google and others don’t give link credit from sites like Facebook, MySpace and others. So what is their value then? Their value lies in getting people excited enough about you that they’ll click through your profile to your website, where the fun can begin! And yes, you can gently massage them in that direction!

If your goals lie more in the direction of search engine rankings and traffic, you’ll be examining sites with a whole different set of eyes. You want sites that give live, followed links, that are very social, and that are getting lots of attention from the search powers that be. (Namely Google) These sites come and go all the time, but there are some that have lasted a while and are proving their worth to those who know how to use them, such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Tumblr and others.

There’s a lot to consider when choosing sites for your social media marketing arsenal; make sure you come to the table armed with all the knowledge you can!

Next time we’ll talk about the methods you use, and what you need to have done for you.

~Keith