Wedding Season Embraces Social Media
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Monthly Archives: April 2012
SEO 101 Part 2 – The Benefits of Social Media
Social Media is beneficial in a variety of ways, not the least of which being its ability to increase your site’s search engine rankings. You might wonder how something like a Facebook profile or a Twitter account can have an effect on your site. The answer lies in the fact that search engines such as Google and Yahoo! take into consideration the amount of traffic your site already gets in addition to how many other sites link to yours.
Incoming Links
We’ll discuss the benefits of a good linking strategy in the next SEO blog (it’s second in importance only to keywords and copy), but for the purposes of a Social Media discussion, it’s vital to understand the core concept that Google, Yahoo! and all the rest of the search engines look for; links FROM reputable sites TO your site. While these search engines do most of the heavy lifting themselves, they leave a certain amount of it to the community at large. What this means to your Web site is that if you have several links coming into your site from reputable sources – as which Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn certainly count – then Google sees those links as “votes of confidence” in the content and relevancy of your site, and will raise your ranking accordingly. This can be reinforced by reciprocating those links.
Traffic
Another factor that the search engines will take into account is how much traffic you’re already getting, via word-of-mouth or other means. In other words, while having a properly-optimized site is of paramount importance, if you somehow manage to drive hundreds of hits to your site daily, Google will raise your ranking. This is instance number 2 where having social media profiles are invaluable – if you’ve got a Facebook account, Twitter handle, LinkedIn profile and all the others which are consistently pumping out interesting, relevant information, people are going to follow the links contained therein to your site, thus boosting you rankings even further.
Funny Friday
How Your Business Can Capitalize on Pinterest’s Addictive-ness
There are currently 17 million people using Pinterest, pinning images onto virtual boards for hours on end. There’s no question that Pinterest is addicting. According to Mediabistro.com, people spend more time on Pinterest than on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn and Google+ combined, with the average monthly user spending one hour and 17 minutes each month on the site.
The thing with Pinterest is—these people—these gifted artsy people, they make us believe that we can do all these cool crafts, inspiring us to create these innovative designs. After more time is wasted trying to recreate an item that we see on Pinterest, we realize the reason we’d never attempted any of these projects before—because we’re a lot better at buying them than making them.
Enter business developers and marketers. If you haven’t realized already, Pinterest isn’t just a great place to DREAM about owning items, but it can also be a great place to ADVERTISE your product to bring in dollar amounts for your company. While blatant advertising is prohibited on Pinterest, users can find many ways to bring awareness to their company without a sign or banner.
Clearly the poor person above is cooking challenged. Why not post a link below the picture of your cupcake to purchase a dozen of these adorable treats? That way, people like me don’t have to embarrass ourselves trying to recreate them ourselves. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished that I could find a certain dress or pair of shoes online with hopes of purchasing. By leaving a simple website below your pin, that person can easily find the item and you will at the very least improve your website’s SEO and traffic, if not increase your sales.
To help better explain Pinterest’s ability to increase your businesses sales, here is a great case study. Holly Xerri, owner and creator of the Camibands noticed sky-rocketed traffic to her site after a Pinterest user pinned the product and it went viral. “In 4 days I had about 40,000 hits on my website,” Xerri said. “All from this [thing called] Pinterest.”
So although we probably won’t be able to afford an indoor waterslide, or a bed that hangs from the ceiling, there are a lot of ways in which to advertise and promote your brand and your products, and benefit monetarily by using Pinterest.
If you’d like help entering your brand into the Pinterest arena, call Viral Technologies toll free at 1.855.718.4725 or email info@viraltechnologies.com!
116th Annual Boston Marathon and Social Media
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Funny Friday
Which Financial Firms Rank the Highest in Social Media Program Effectiveness?
One of the leading competitive intelligence providers for financial institutions, Corporate Insight, announced today the financial firms that are utilizing social media with the greatest effectiveness. The report entitled, “Social Media Leaders,” gives a summary of more than 90 financial services firms and the way in which they use varying social media platforms.
In order to find the best uses of social media within these financial services firms, Corporate Insight used three components to base each of their programs’ effectiveness; audience, content, and engagement. Each firm’s “social value” was measured by the latter factors. As one would probably imagine, a share would weigh higher in social value than would a comment, and a comment would have more social value than a “like.”
What Corporate Insight found was that American Express was using their social media channels the most efficiently. According to their findings, American Express was one of the pioneers in utilizing social media for businesses, starting their first pages in 2006 and 2007. Presently, they maintain five separate Facebook pages which all are largely populated and engaging, and has the largest Twitter following in its industry.
We certainly agree with Alan Maginn, senior analyst and social media expert at Corporate Insight when he said, “Engagement is truly what sets social media apart from more traditional business-to-consumer communications, and this direct interaction…is a major benefit of a wall-executed social media offering.”
For more information, the full press release can be seen here.
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$ocial Media
There has been a lot of chatter about the efficiency of social media, and how it can effectively be incorporated into a profitable marketing plan. Business-owners want to know what the return on investment will be before they dish out large sums of money to enter the social media realm. The thing is, measuring the efficacy of social media in dollars is really hard to do, and really, isn’t the correct way to measure its profitability within your company.
It’s important, when thinking about starting or broadening a social media sector of your company, to create a strategy that will bring in MEASUREABLE results. An increase in followers or fans for example is a great way to measure your success in social media. You may wonder the importance of people “following” you, but if you dissect your findings in terms of exposure and bringing awareness to your business, an increase in fans may bring you a more favorable response.
Another way to measure the effectiveness of social media is through customer engagement. The more content you pump out to your following, the greater chance you have at engaging with them to create more meaningful relationships with your potential clients, and to make sure that all of their questions and comments are addressed. In making sure to respond to your fans/followers, you are sure to gain a loyal following of brand ambassadors, who will be quick to spread the good word about your company.
The most important thing to remember is that your consumers don’t buy products from a logo, they buy a product from YOU, a PERSON. Remember that when interacting with a potential client, even if the conversation happens through the internet.