Thursday, July 5, 2012

Get More Out Of Your Social Media



Here are recommendations to help you develop a successful social media program:


  1. Be consistent.  While it may seem intuitive, consistency across social channels in a few key areas can significantly enhance how authoritative your social channels become. 
  2. Write unique content: While it may seem much easier to simply copy and paste your social messages across the various channels, this adds little value to the respective channels. Duplicate content is recognized by search engine crawlers, and does not help enhance your social authority. From a user’s perspective, there is no reason to follow, like, and join your circle if they can do only one of these to receive all of the information that you may be sharing. Change up your message a bit to speak to your unique audience, as they differ from Twitter, Facebook, and other channels.
  3. Share your own content: If you add additional content to your website, are offering a promotion, or would like to highlight a unique selling point of your company, share these links on your social channels. Not only does this reach your audience that are already engaged with you, but it also creates citations to this content and builds the authority of the host of this content. Build your website’s authority and reach your audience in one easy step!
  4. Share content of others: Become a recognized player in your industry or in your local areas by networking and monitoring the power social users that are most relevant to you. If you would network or partner with them in person, do this online as well by visiting their social channels and sharing, retweeting, @mentioning, or connecting in any other way. Not only can you leverage the mutual relevancy in content, but also take advantage of having similar target audiences based on your local market.
  5. Share your media from one channel on the other (when appropriate): While it is important to keep the media on your social channels fresh, you can help build how well these channels work together by sharing between them. For instance, if you want to share a video on Facebook and Twitter, upload it onto your YouTube channel and share this link. Additionally, if you want to add images to your Pinboard on Pinterest, upload them to Flickr and pin them to your Pinterest account from here. This will create an authorship tag on the images being pinned that links back to your Flickr gallery. By sharing media hosted in one channel, you are building the authority and reach of these social channels, ensuring that they are working with one another and maximizing their value.
We know Google is influenced by social signals. How many people are tweeting, liking, pinning, subscribing, and ‘plus one-ing’ your content can have a significant impact on your search engine results pages (SERPs).

By following the five recommendations above, you will build your company's audience and maximize its online brand value quickly.
Source: Scott Shabot