Showing posts with label search marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label search marketing. Show all posts

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Six Key Benefits of Using Social Media for Small Business

This blog entry first appeared on openforum.com, American Express OPEN's award-winning site providing insights, advice and connections for small business owners. You can find more articles and updates at http://www.openforum.com.

You can also follow me on Twitter at @jasonrudman and follow OPEN Forum at @openforum. This post was written in collaboration with Courtney Colwell at Federated Media.
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Occasionally, I’ll read an article suggesting that small businesses aren’t seeing the value of social media, the evidence most often cited being a lack of direct sales for some business owners. And each time I want to ask, what were their initial strategies for using social media? What about the other benefits they might see?

Given the impressive array of social media tools you can choose from – such as blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and OPEN Forum – it’s become increasingly important to first develop your strategic goals for how social media might help your business, and then determine which tools will help you achieve those goals. This first step cannot be underestimated, as how successful you are with social media should be measured against those goals.

In thinking about your strategy, consider the following key benefits I most often hear from small business owners:

  • Search results: In a previous article on building exposure through search results, I discussed how using social media can help you improve your ranking in search results. By extending your presence onto other sites, especially those of high “quality”, and building links from those sites back to your own, you can help elevate your ranking in search results and thus increase exposure for your business. But you should be thoughtful in your approach, as how and where you build those links carries different value. To be more efficient, focus on sites and engagement most relevant to your existing and potential customers.

  • Brand management: As Yelp and other opinion sites gain momentum, you should consider your options for protecting your brand reputation, remembering that advocates as well detractors can comment on your business. By using social media to proactively find and build relationships with customers; you may be able to turn them into fans to help deflect any negative opinions that may arise. As the saying goes, the best defense is a good offense. Also, by building more positive sentiment for your brand through social media, you can help ensure that when someone searches for your company, they’re less likely to find any negative comments or that any they find are far outweighed by positive sentiment.

  • Relationships: More than a broadcast tool, social media offers a unique opportunity to network online and build your business. Paul Rosenfeld, CEO of Fanminder, has found partners, customers, investors, and employees through social media, including on OPEN Forum’s Connectodex. Donna Johnson, CEO of Indie Business Media, said recently about Twitter, specifically: “I use it to have conversations and share information with my customers and business colleagues. I reach out to them, they reach back to me. We share, connect, learn and talk business. How can that not be a benefit to my business, even if every Tweet does not result in a sale?”

  • Brand awareness: Social media presents an incredible opportunity to generate brand awareness among a targeted audience. Begin by researching what channels and tools your customers are using, and then start engaging and linking back to your own website. While you may not see an enormous spike in traffic, you can be reasonably assured that those who do follow the link are more likely to be future customers. “I’ve gotten quite a few leads from OPEN Forum,” Suzanne Vara, founder of Kherize5 Advertising & Marketing. “It’s taken time to build a consistent presence, but eventually, people have noticed how involved I am in the community and have started reaching out.”

  • Innovation: Social media can be a great learning tool, as well. By knowing where your customers are talking about your products and services – or better yet – giving them a place to do so on your own site, you may find new areas for improvement or innovation. Many of the improvements we made to OPEN Forum came after paying attention to feedback we’d received on the previous version of the site, as well as engaging our customers in conversations about how best we can meet their needs.

  • Competitive Research: Besides the concern that your competitors may already be using social media, the upside is that by following what your competitors are doing and saying, or what customers are saying about them, you may find ways to differentiate your brand and get better results. Rosalie Kramm, President of Kramm & Associates, says, “Keeping track of competitors and clients’ activities is very valuable. I can see what competitors are doing on social media and see how they’re marketing themselves.”

Given these benefits, it is worthwhile noting that not all social media tools are right for every small business. While it may offer a less-expensive marketing option, social media marketing can sometimes cost more in time than in money. That’s why it’s so important to start with a strategic vision for how social media can contribute to building your business. As Anita Campbell says in this article on social media, “From a business perspective, if this is done aimlessly it can be more noise than signal... Often this disappointment results from approaching social media without a clear strategy and plan.”

Social media should be considered as part of your overall marketing plan, tying back your activity to specific goals, such as generating awareness for a new product or event or creating a feedback channel for customers. Once you determine some clear objectives – as well as where your audience is – you can develop a plan for what channels to use and how much time to dedicate. This will help you separate social media as a business tool rather than diversion, and then you can better assess if the time invested is paying off.

If you are an American Express OPEN Cardmember and haven’t created a profile on OPEN Forum, I invite you to do so – simply log in to OPENForum.com with your Americanexpress.com user name and password to get started.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Building Exposure through Search Results

This blog entry first appeared on openforum.com, American Express OPEN's award-winning site providing insights, advice and connections for small business owners. You can find more articles and updates at http://www.openforum.com.

You can also follow me on Twitter at @jasonrudman and follow OPEN Forum @openforum. This post was written in collaboration with Courtney Colwell at Federated Media.
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The power of social media to help make connections may be obvious to many business owners, but what may not be is the effect it can have on your search rankings. And for marketing your business, there are few tools more critical than search rankings, as this is most likely how your customers will find you.

There are many Web sites, articles, and other resources that can help explain the impact of social media on search engine optimization (SEO) more fully (John Battelle’s Searchblog is one such resource). At a basic level, though, SEO involves incorporating into the content of your Web site(s), blog, and/or other online properties target keywords and other tactics to increase your rankings among organic results (as opposed to paid inclusion). Important tactics include increasing the number of places where your content exists, as well as ways people can find it.

If another site links to yours, search engines read this, i.e. the more “inbound” links to your site, the better. However, not all links are equal; quality matters. Inbound links from “quality” web sites with high relevance and authority hold greater value, as do organic (editorial) links. Good examples include a link to your site from within an article, your own guest blog post, or a profile on a site.

So where do you start? Well, first answer what you are trying to accomplish with social media. In an article about getting started in social media, John Jantsch outlined some initial thoughts to consider in building your social media strategy. He described a “hub and spoke” model, in which your “hub” is the central location for your online brand presence – the home base you use the “spokes” to drive traffic to. Your Web site and/or blog could be your hub; your spokes (link) could be a fan page on Facebook, videos on YouTube – or a profile on OPEN Forum. These quality links can then help elevate your ranking in search results and, thus, increase exposure for your business.

For OPEN Cardmembers, creating a profile in the Connectodex is an easy way to add a high value link. By creating a descriptive profile on OPEN Forum, one that includes your own URL, your business site may benefit from OPEN Forum’s demonstrated “authority” in search rankings. And, the more “spokes” you link to via your profile, such as to your Twitter page or LinkedIn profile, the better. Remember also that a compelling description, one that includes terms that potential customers might use to find you, can help.

One of the most compelling examples of this is demonstrated by my search for “Hufft Projects”, an architectural firm and OPEN Forum member based in Kansas City, MO. The image above shows those search results, the first being their Web site, the second their listing in a regional directory of architectural firms, and the third is their profile on OPEN Forum. What is worth noticing about these results against some other searches is that Hufft Projects’ Connectodex profile appears even higher than their Facebook and Twitter pages. While it is not necessarily the case for all Connectodex profiles, the detailed description Hufft Projects created indicates how a robust profile can help you build search equity.

If you are an American Express OPEN Cardmember and haven’t created a profile on OPEN Forum, I invite you to do so – simply log in to OPENForum.com with your Americanexpress.com user name and password to get started.