Find Your Social Media Tools and Purpose

It's the new buzz. Everyone is talking about and participating in social media, the communication and sharing phenomenon where anyone can play an active role in your Internet brand management. And "tweeting" is a blast, but Twitter and the like are not just fun and games. Behind every social media strategy, and for that matter Internet marketing strategy, are numbers waiting to be looked at and a clear path to be taken depending on your business' goals. Social media analytics, you might say. Have you set business goals for your Social Media endeavors? Today, Big Picture Web talks about social media tools and purpose.

Social Media Tools, Toys and Tactics

First off, social media is a broad playground full of tools, toys and tactics . There are communication tools (Twitter), communities ( Facebook), bookmarking sites (StumbleUpon), the blogosphere (Technorati); even user reviews and ratings that you see on Amazon.com are considered social media tools (my friends at Social Media, What? uncover and review new social media tools all the time). Every social media tool has a different purpose waiting to be applied to your business. And that's the real question... have you found your social media purpose?

Internet Brand Management

In the days before social media, only a quarterly earnings statement or a carefully crafted press release would make it to the masses. There was a limit to who could define your brand through media. With social media, everyone is a publisher with an opinion. Including your customers. Andy Beal's Radically Transparent is all about Internet brand management and describes how word-of-mouth has gone online. In a nutshell, Mr. Beal stresses the potential impact of social media on your business and explains how to participate in these public conversations to further and protect your brand. This is your social media purpose. And there are tools that will help you get there.

Social Media Analytics. Like Google Analytics

You can combine your social media tools and purpose in three easy steps. Find and listen to the conversations. Participate. Use social media analytics to measure your progress.

1. Monitor. Sites like Social Mention and Search.Twitter.com allow you to search social media for mentions of your brand, service or product. These passive listening devices are phenomenal for identifying everything from customer service opportunities to copyright infringement issues. Finding your customers can be a challenge, but you'll be happy you did.
2. Participate. Once you find your audience and have identified your business goals, you can begin to use social media for Internet brand management. Use Twitter to communicate with customers voicing concern about your product via their tweets. Use social bookmarking sites to seed your newest content in an effort to bring new customers. Encourage customers to review your products or services. Just be sure you have a specific business goal in mind as you join the conversation.
3. Social Media Analytics. Now that you're listening and participating, measure your success with social media analytics. Track Social Mention for the number of good, bad and indifferent comments are made about your brand. You can tag your URLs (e.g., links to your homepage) before you tweet them to make them trackable in your Web Analytics software. Use Twitteranalyzer to see how people are reacting to your message. If you have a business goal, there is a way to track it and folks out there eager to show you how. (In fact, Andy and Doug at Managing the Edge just did a great show on Social Media Measurement.)

So there you have it. Social media is important for Internet brand management. Monitor and participate in these conversations and then use social media analytics to gauge your performance. Combine your social media tools and purpose to achieve results!

How to Increase Website Traffic with Search Engine Optimization

You have the impossible task. You've been told that this is the year that you need to do more than ever. You have to get more sales, increase Website traffic and perform a verifiable miracle with last year's budget. Did I say last year's budget? I meant 90% of last year's budget. If all of this seems impossible, I assure you it's not. We can begin to address these challenges by answering one simple question, "What does SEO stand for?"

What Does SEO Stand for? Part I.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the process of getting your Website to appear higher in the search engines' results pages and ultimately increase Website traffic for a given search keyword phrase. Sounds easy, right? Don't worry. We'll get to how to do it in a minute, but for right now, let's discuss why it's important.

Articles on SEO, but what about Search?

Other articles on SEO often breeze past a critical point when talking about SEO: search engines! There are now 15 billion searches performed each month on the main search engines. Users performed 9.5 billion Google searches in April '09 alone. And in all of those searches are people trying to find information about you, your products and how to buy them. Do you know how much search traffic you're getting from these folks or how much you could be getting? Are you doing your part to find them? To bring the proverbial horse to the water? Your competitor is. Guaranteed. They've read articles on SEO and have probably even hired SEO agencies. And here we are: "What does SEO stand for?" There's no time to spare. Read on for a crash course in SEO.

What Does SEO Stand for? Part II.

Now that we're all headed in the same direction, let's do it. Let's actually increase Website traffic through SEO. Some of what comes next is technical, but don't worry. I've placed links to additional resources in the margins of this Web page. With the start you're getting here at Big Picture Web and the next steps you could take by buying the resources mentioned, you'll conquer the learning curve in no time. Ultimately, it's simply a matter of having an SEO-focused content creation process, having plenty of links to your site and architecting your site to be search-engine-friendly. Let's discuss these three steps.

Increase Website Traffic in Three Steps

1. Have a content creation process.  People use specific search "keyword phrases" to find things on the Web (e.g., "flights to MSP" or "dental equipment"). You should know what these keyword phrases are for your business and then jump at any organized opportunity to include these words in the actual text and images of your Website. Write product descriptions, blogs, articles, about us pages and everything else with "dental equipment" somehow baked into the words of the pages. This is what the articles on SEO will tell you to do to increase Website traffic. Get it? Notice the bolded phrases from two sentences ago. Now do you get it? Once you've done a little homework, you can set up a process that looks like this:
2. Have plenty of links to your site.  The best way to describe why links are important is this. Imagine that Google is looking out into a crowd of Websites trying to determine which should be the first one presented when someone searched for a particular keyword phrase. The Website with its hand raised highest will be the one selected. Every link from another Website is like a tiny leg-up to help your site gain some visibility. The site with the most links towers over the rest in Google's eyes, which will earn it the top spot in search results for the keyword phrases you're targeting. You'll want to build links to your site by creating link-worthy content, asking your business partners to link to your site and encouraging customers to link to you as well. Do this and increase Website traffic, you will!
3. Get your technical team involved.  SEO requires that your website be built on a specific foundation. This foundation includes creating an appropriate navigation structure and addressing how the individual lines of HTML, Javascript and CSS are arranged on the Website. (Please don't assume that your technical team knows all this. Encourage them to reference articles on SEO or resources listed in the margins.)

What does SEO stand for? Part III.

Once you get some links built up and have a process in place on an optimized website, you'll see that SEO is an easy process to implement and track. You'll increase Website traffic regularly and spend less and less time (and money!) doing so. The increase in traffic will in turn lead to more sales and you'll be the hero. See? It wasn't impossible.