Tag Archives: Social Media Marketing

Three Phases of Social Optimization

Three Phases of Social Optimization

Onsite Optimization – Social Buttons are CTA Buttons

Why do it?

Why should you care about where your social buttons show up? For the same reason you care where you place your buy button on your landing pages; optimal button placement leads to higher conversions, whether the conversion in question is a fresh share of your blog content or product page, or a new Facebook Fan or LinkedIn group member.

In this sense, social buttons need to be viewed as calls to action. Find places on your pages that are the most visible and drop your social buttons there. What works best for your readers? Scrolling sidebar? Above and below the posts? All of the social buttons or just a select few? Test it and find out.

How to do it:

There are several ways to go about testing your social button placement. I’ll suggest a few here for you to start with, but feel free to expand and investigate alternate methods. If you find any good ones, let me know in the comments!

  • Use heat/click maps to see where your visitors click. Use a service like CrazyEgg to see where your visitors are lingering on a page and then place your social buttons accordingly. Once you’ve got your buttons in a spot that you think will convert well, run another click map to make sure you’re getting the focus on those buttons!
  • Just because the new button placement worked on a blog post doesn’t mean that it will work on a product page. Test your button placement and track the social action over a number of new posts and pages to see which works best.
  • Get creative with your social button placement. If you find that it converts best in the top-left corner, try putting the buttons in a scrolling sidebar. Or, if above/below the posts works best, make it a scrolling footer or header. Do users click social buttons at the bottom of posts rather than the top? Have your buttons pop up in a dynamic window once they scroll past a certain point in the post.
  • As always, only put social buttons where they make sense; you don’t want to pull people away from the final steps in your checkout process so they can look at your Facebook page. Buttons that allow you to share should be placed in locations that will attract more visitors: product pages, blog posts, the homepage, testimonial pages, etc. As a general rule, the further down the marketing funnel you go (IE: the closer you are to a conversion), the less you want to include social buttons.

While you’re testing your button placement, be sure you’re adhering to basic A/B testing practices. Don’t put too many social buttons on your site. For me, I’ve found that placing three key sharing locations works best for me. It’s like the holy trinity of social sharing.

But don’t take my experience as law; test your site and see which works best for you. If you overload your page with social buttons, your conversion rate will drop significantly. As a general rule, don’t put social buttons on your page for networks that you yourself are not active in. If someone shares your article on Orkut, you’ll never know and you won’t be able to engage with them.

2. Profile Optimization – Your Profile is a Landing Page

Why do it?

Your profile is how people find you. Several social tools making their way onto the scene are mining your profile to find topics you’re influential on, for example, Followerwonk. Examples of people who have increased their fans or followers abound. Rand Fishkin, well-known co-founder of SEOmoz, increased his Twitter follower accrual rate by just changing his profile picture.

Beyond the profile picture, your bio and description are critical to attracting new fans and followers. Whether it’s your Twitter bio, your Facebook fan page description, or your LinkedIn group’s description, you’ve got to make sure your description attracts new people. Optimizing your profile increases the likelihood that you show up higher in the search engines for the keyword you’re targeting (as should be obvious for anyone working in SEO). If your potential follower finds you through Twitter’s proprietary search engine or a fan runs a basic Google search to find sites in your niche, having a profile that is optimized for the correct keywords will help you show up higher in the results. Easily identifiable interests in your profile attract targeted followers.

How to do it:

First, before you can gather any quantifiable results, you’ve got to establish a baseline. Monitor your profile’s performance for at least two weeks and tally your follower/fan/member accrual rate. Now try modifying your profile (changing logo, profile pic, etc). Do keyword research, just like you would for any other piece of content you’re trying to promote on the web. Monitor your accrual rate for another two weeks. Repeat ad nauseum.

A sure way to alienate potential followers or fans is to stuff your bio full of strong and identifiable keywords. Limit yourself to two or three that describe what you do, what you share on, and what they can expect to see. Steer clear of overused phrases like “[subject] ninja/guru/expert” in your bio. Tell your fans what you do and allow them to decide how good you are at it. This may be more subjective than the other points here but hey, test it and see what works best for you!

3. Sharing Optimization – Sharing Content IS Content

Why do it?

Knowing when to say something is as important as knowing what to say. Sharing your best content when none of your followers are online to see it is just as useless as throwing spam to a crowd of followers. Using tools that identify when your followers are most commonly online and optimizing the time at which you share your content can increase conversion, reshare and retweet rates.

How to do it:

There are several tools out in the wide world of social analytics that can help you identify when to share to get the most impressions and reshares/retweets. Use tools like Tweriodand Crowdbooster to find out when your followers are online and tweet accordingly. You can schedule updates via apps like Timely and Buffer. If all else fails, you can simply post an update at the right time (crazy, right?).

For other metrics, like how well a share converts based on length of the update/share, employ some good, old-fashioned Excel data tracking. Rand Fishkin (again) found that, for him, shorter updates yielded higher clickthrough rates. What works best for you?

While you’re testing, though, be sure you don’t spam to test conversion rates. There’s no quicker way to lose followers and fans than to blast the link over and over in different formats. In the linked page above, a survey found that 66% of Twitter users would unfollow someone for spam sharing, and 58% would unfollow someone if they appeared automated. Space it out, get some friends to tweet variations of your message and see which does best. Automating your profile will also get people to block/unfollow you, so don’t completely automate your sharing.

The Four Cardinal Rules of Social Optimization

  1. Social buttons should be viewed as call to action buttons, and just as important as getting a user to click a buy button.
  2. A social profile is a landing page.
  3. Sharing content IS content. Optimizing your content doesn’t stop when it’s published, you’ve got to make sure the copy associated with what your sharing works too.
  4. As with all testing, you need significant traffic numbers to quantify significant results. Ideally, your testing pages should see a total of 1,000 visitors over the testing period to make any informed conclusion.

Credit: KISSmetrics

effective Youtube video ad campaign

effective Youtube video ad campaign

Facebook is the go-to social network for social advertisers, and the site has certainly proved it’s value in returning good results and awareness for brands. Youtube is a less obvious choice for many marketers, yet it’s an excellent platform for running social video ads and can prove to be cost-effective while delivering real business results. Many businesses of course, will be put off by Youtube as they may not have the necessary video assets to fully capitalise on this, but Youtube’s promoted video option is something that brands should focus on and you don’t necessarily need to invest in full-scale video production, if you have a clear strategy in place to make the content work for you.

The audience

To provide some context on how Youtube advertising can work, the video below shows the impressive figures behind Youtube homepage takeovers. While this is a much more significant advertising undertaking for brands than a standard promoted video campaign, the figures show how engaged audiences are on Youtube. Google and Compete recently ran a report into the effectiveness of Facebook ads, with some surprising results. Given that the ad report was commissioned by Google, these findings are of course skewed towards the positive, but they are useful nonetheless.

Read More: effective Youtube video ad campaign

VSEO or Video Search Engine Optimization is Revolutionary

SAY HELLO TO VSEO ( Video Search Engine Optimization)

VSEO or Video Search Engine Optimization is revolutionary Turn that can take companies’ video and spread it over the far reaches of the Internet, and then make it easy to find in search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and more.

Streaming videos from YouTube, interactive websites like blogs, and more have forced companies to evolve at the speed of light.

Video optimization has emerged as one of the latest SEO techniques which have taken the SEO world with a stride. Earlier this technique was discarded by many SEO’s as they thought it wasn’t too effective and not catchy with the audience. However, they are now proved wrong as the majority of SEO’s use YouTube optimization techniques for getting top ranking.

For that you need to know the answer to the following questions:

Source: Search Marketing Inc Digital Marketing Blog

SEO Friendly Website Tips

SEO Friendly Website Tips

SEO has become a valuable online marketing tool for businesses of all shapes and sizes, but for an SEO campaign to be successful, solid foundations need to be in place. Doing things right from the offset can really reap the benefits, save time and money.

Keyword Research – Start to build, in addition, pages for content that target these specific keywords based on your findings, or at least have a plan of where these pages may go down the line once the site has launched.

SEO Friendly Navigation

Search Engine Friendly Navigation / SEO Friendly Navigation - One of the many factors of on-page SEO is the internal linking structure and the navigational system is the backbone for this. Having buttons and links which are text-based is a major plus and great for accessibility.

Website Loading Speed - Major SEO Factor which was  introduced early. It consists of various elements to be followed… below mentioned are few suggestions

    • CSS files – remove unwanted/unused code.
    • Amount of JavaScript in Code – This will slow depending on what you are using it.
    • File Size - remove unwanted space and unessiential line breaks

Website Images
- Reduce image file sizes are Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Fireworks or any Image using software. I personally recommend Adobe Fireworks.

If your site is related to eCommerce use smaller images in galleries rather than bigger ones. Remember speed is now a key factor with SEO and can’t be avoided.

Keyword Structure for website – Get Improtant keywords on the page. Below mentioned are suitable places:

  • Meta Data
  • Captions
  • Navigation
  • H1 – H4 Tags
  • Breadcrumbs
  • Attribute Links
  • Internal Links
  • Footer Links
  • URL Structure
  • Folder Names

Social Icons – Social a good way to demonstrate to potential customers that the company has a good social networks. Make the website links contactable on social networks with prominent buttons and icons

Sitemaps - Sitemaps are purely designed to tell the search engines about all of the content on the website.

Major websites without sitemaps  is the lack of pages that are indexed in  Search Engines. Sitemaps can be used in different formats like XML, ROR, HTML & URL LIST

W3C Validation – Always validation of the website is required to make sure that there are no more errors in website.

Below mentioned are few links which are useful to Validate your website.

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