Archive for the ‘social media marketing’ Category

Technorati have introduced a new feature to their website called Twittorati.  Twittorati is an area where people can see what Technorati’s top 100 bloggers are tweeting about.  The subjects of the blogs are on a variety of subjects and as a result the tweets are a weird and wonderful mix of opinions, stories, news items and random comments.

Twittorati allows you to see tweets in real time and they can be organized by latest tweets or by authority ranking.  Tweets can be filtered using Technorati tags and Twitter hashtags.

Personally, I feel it is a great resource to check on a morning to find latest news and developments in a variety of subjects.  Also a great place to find quality people to follow on twitter.

If ever there was an example of what not to do on your social media campaign this would be it. Habitat, the major UK retailer has been engaging in some very underhand tactics through the popular social networking site Twitter.

With only a few followers on their Twitter account Habitat chose to promote their new sale in a rather unethical manner. Using the popular hash tag facility Habitat targeted keywords that had absolutely nothing to do with their current sale but are heavily searched upon within Twitter e.g. #Apple, #phone and even #Mousavi.

One thing is for sure they certainly got people tweeting about their brand but not in the way they had intended. The spammed twitter users were furious with the blatant misuse of the tags.

It would appear that Habitat have now deleted their initial attempt at promoting their discounts and instead have started engaging with followers in a more ethical way.

Although this was a tough lesson learned by Habitat I can’t help but feel they have severely damaged their brand and whilst they can try to hide the evidence, it is almost impossible to remove completely.

A fantastic blog by Karl Harvard this week on econsultancy.com talks about how SEO is evolving from just keywords and content. Off site optimisation such as blogging and contributing to other social networks.

A social media engagement strategy is now key in terms of SEO for clients. The key is getting clients to buy into this and accept this as part of an SEO strategy. With SEO, there is a distinct skill in writing optimised content and being able to code effectively for SEO. With social media marketing, its all about research and time - making sure that you put the effort in and that you are selective in where you put the effort in.

The theory of themes still runs true - if you run a site that sells gardening equipment, make sure you post on other sites within your genre. Relevant quality traffic is what you want, and building a picture of your site being a regular contributer to popular relevant content sites is key.

Social Media Marketing as we term it here, is the area we expect to grow the most over the next 12 months, and its long and short term benefits towards your overall SEO strategy should not be overlooked.

Not too sure about the goal hanger term though Karl. Where I come from it was called a “jonny liner”, presumably because a lad called Jonny was obsessed with standing on the goal line…

With the growth in usage of the social media marketing and companies actively participating in sites such as twitter, facebook, digg, etc, there is a growing need for companies to monitor what people are writing about them online.

There are many online tracking tools to do this but the all only seem to monitor certain elements.  Others are positioned as Online PR tracking tools, which to some extent this is what it is, but at the end of the day, it’s about what some conversation people have had about a particiular company / article /blog posting etc.

Some good examples of free social media tracking tools would be:

Google Alerts - get email updates from relevant Google results (news, blogs etc)

Tweet scan - get updates from twitter, identi.ca and other Laconica-based sites with more being added all the time

However you still have to trawl through the alerts you receive in your inbox and work out which are important or ones that you can ignnore.

I came across Brandwatch which is a great online tool for pulling all this information from social media sites into one interface and allows you to track your competitors - and tells you if the chat is good or not! it even segments the data so you can view it by media (blogs, news, forums etc). How refreshing to find some technology that solves the hassle of the tracking and makes the information easy to interpret.

In the past year the micro networking site Twitter has grown in traffic by 10 fold in the past year (source: Hitwise).  Twitter is one of the fastest growing sites on the internet and looks like this is continued to grow.

How can you make the most of Twittering?

Let me explain the opportunity by giving you a scenario. Company X has set up a twitter monitoring postings related to their products they sell on their e-commerce website.  One of the alerts shows someone is looking for a voucher for their website.  They respond to the individual with a discount voucher for their site.  If they had not been monitoring Twitter, one of their competitors could easily have taken this opportunity to promote their site.

Including Twitter monitoring as part of your online marketing mix or part of your social media marketing is certainly worth considering as the website is growing so quickly.

A good start to the SEO year with an update in the Google Page Rank.  This was confirmed by Matt Cutts (Head of Google search team).  Hearsay from other leading industry blogs suggest that this PR update has not effected many rankings for sites.  Which suggests that PR is not such a major criteria for rankings as it use to be.

Back in October 2008 there was another update where obvious paid links were devalued and PR aligned accordingly.

So what does this mean for link building campaigns?

Inbound links historically have been a primary be a source of traffic into a site and a way of promote the site.  Inbound links from social media marketing could be the next generation of inbound links. This source of inbound links potentially could create the competitive edge online and drive quality traffic too.