Social Media Marketing – Doing Business with Real People

There’s a reason why social media marketing has exploded in popularity, especially for big brand businesses that have traditionally hidden behind corporate logos – people love to do business with real people.  There’s something very rewarding about connecting with another person and something very satisfying about knowing that they’re listening and paying attention.  Transfer that to social media marketing and you have unlimited potential to foster trust and credibility to grow customer relationships.

The People Behind Social Media Marketing

Try as you might, it’s extremely difficult to create a bot that can deliver an authentic human experience.  People try and people fail – often customers are insulted when they get hooked up with an automated chat bot through “live 24/7 support” links on websites.  Social media marketing works because there are people behind it.  It doesn’t have to be the CEO to make it appreciated.

Think about the last time you called a 1-800 number or some customer service line.  How did it feel when you suddenly got trapped in phone-tree hell?  It didn’t get any better when companies added voice print analysis to force you to talk it out instead of pressing buttons.

What about those websites you’ve visited in the past that were filled with corporate jargon, hype and content that provided no answers and even less value – was that an enjoyable experience?  Unlike social media marketing, it’s not likely that those sites and that phone-tree hell made you feel like the company cared about you and your experience.

Social Media Marketing is for the Customer Who Craves Interaction

And there are a lot of us.  We repress the urge to choke pushy salesman but we stand irked in a business when someone doesn’t greet us or we can’t find someone to answer a question.  There is a fine line between engagement and departure that your business needs to master and social media marketing gives you the ability to do just that.

When you build content that is targeted especially for your buyer personas then you’re able to build on a relationship with your customers before you ever meet them.

Content online that’s created by a nameless and faceless corporate does little to inspire engagement – at the worst it pushes the customer away.  Strong, compelling and engaging content delivered through social media marketing lets your customer and target audience know that you’re open for business and you’re ready to start talking.

Use Social Media Marketing to Give Your Organization a Voice

At the end of the day there isn’t a single person out there that wants to do business all the time with automated systems.  We crave interaction with other people and we want to know that there’s a living, breathing individual behind a blog, a tweet, or a Facebook profile.  We also need to know that should the need arise, those people will reach out through their social media marketing and help us.  That’s exactly what you should be doing with your own social media marketing strategy.

There’s no secret formula to success when it comes to building your brand online.  There’s no magic button.  It’s all about providing something very valuable and very useful to your target audience.  Whether that’s a complete how-to guide on washing a cat in the toilet or an open forum via social media marketing it’s always appreciated and it always builds credibility when done properly.

Playing in the Content Marketing Jungle

Marketing by itself is a ravenous world that can eat businesses alive if it’s not handled carefully.  In the world of online and offline marketing, the content marketing aspect is a tangled jungle of media that can be difficult for businesses to navigate.  This is often the reason why the bypass the concept of content marketing in favor of more traditional advertising like the Yellow pages or direct mail.

If this is something you’ve encountered, it’s may not necessarily be that you don’t believe content marketing has its benefits it’s just that deciding how to get started is the biggest hurdle.  Thankfully, once you get past that initial hump of reasoning out content marketing the benefits are massive. Read the rest of this entry »

Content Syndication – The Bane of Market Competitors

To put it in the simplest form possible, the search engines absolutely love people like you if you’re crafting great material and utilizing content syndication to reach out to your customers and target audience.  You’ll get considerably attention from the search engines like Google if you’re producing keyword rich content such as blogs and articles as well as optimized content like videos.

Those who divide and spread their resources out among various media to get most out of content syndication will certainly conquer, and it’s their stuff that ends up on all over the first page of Google. Read the rest of this entry »

Examining the Foundation of Content Marketing

When you bring up content marketing, people commonly think of those things that can be widely distributed, especially where content can be carried and shared with the potential to go viral.  While this is a strong and true representation of what content marketing it, it does not accurately define the reality of content and how content marketing is applied to the overall presence of a brand on the web.

Cleverly Disguised Content Marketing Opportunities

Content marketing certainly goes beyond the commonly distributable media we deal with on a daily basis to expand our brands.  The cornerstone of content marketing of course is content.  So what is content when it comes to who we are on the web? Read the rest of this entry »

Content Marketing – Different Name, Same Great Concept

Content marketing has continued to grow in popularity and necessity since the term was first coined by the Content Marketing Institute and Junta42 back in 2007.  Before they were able to shift people over to using this term, content marketing was referred to as “custom publishing”.  While the name was different, the concept behind content marketing is still the same.

As is the need for it. Read the rest of this entry »

Article Submission Software – Why Google is Fighting Back

Google isn’t necessarily targeting any specific piece of article submission software but they know the programs are out there and they know what those software applications tend to do to content on the web.  This isn’t to say that all software applications for handling content syndication and article submission software are bad, but there are plenty of poorly-designed systems that have given content marketing a bad name. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re already savvy to social media marketing and content syndication, then you know one of the best ways to improve brand

visibility and develop rapport with your target audience is through the production and sharing of really strong content – content that is valuable, informative, entertaining, etc.

We typically share that content through traditional means; posting it to a blog, through tweets or sharing it within a Facebook business page.  Once you turn that content loose though… how certain are you that it’s going to travel?  How far will it travel? Read the rest of this entry »

If you lined up the web as we use it today next to the web of 2001 you would see a strong contrast in how content is used, perceived and shared.  The social aspect as invaded every corner of the web but it hasn’t actually replaced the concept of content (or the need for it).  It’s actually reinforced it.

The success of the social web is the need for is based around sharing.  If the only thing people did online was say hello they wouldn’t bother staying glued to a PC or laptop.  Simple text messages or a telephone can do that.  The social web is about sharing content.  It started with peer to peer file sharing and it’s moved on to the everyday content that we enjoy from articles and blog posts to marketing reports and clever quotes.

The Invasion of Social Media

Sharing in social media or social media marketing used to involved actually condensing content down enough (link included) and manually passing it out among our followers and networks.  Now, social media is invading every aspect of the web in order to make sharing that much easier.

Plugins for social bookmarking along with social bookmarking software applications have turned a passive activity into a major tool for marketing.  With simple social sharing buttons it’s become easier than ever to provide a method for sharing directly in articles, blog posts and even eBooks.

Clever tip that few use:  Does your eBook or Marketing report have social sharing buttons to help with viral spread?

With all the potential for sharing, it seems like a no-brainer to make sure there are multiple methods for sharing within your content but few people actually leverage this opportunity.  Despite all the function, the social web is lost on many and it often comes down a matter of “missing the value” or the benefits associated.

The Benefits of Social Media Marketing

This goes beyond simply passing a link off to a few friends or some random groups of niche followers within the Digg community.  There are a number of benefits to pushing the envelope on social media marketing – with at least as much power as you put behind other marketing efforts:

Thought Leadership

This is one of the most powerful aspects of social media marketing and content syndication and it should be at the heart of developing your content marketing strategy.  When you develop quality content targeted to your audience – content that is valuable and information – your target audience starts to see you in a new light;  they see you as a thought leader.

You become recognized as the go to person within your market, whether that’s on a local, regional or global level.  The more content that is shared, the most the rapport develops with the people you want to do business with.  The social media invasion gives you the opportunity to make your content easily sharable – and people want to share it.  Give them the tools and resources (or buttons) to do minimize the effort and watch the content syndication unfold.

Social Buzz

Some wished for it, others never saw it coming but the most recent update from Google has put a strong emphasis on social buzz and the clout or authority of authors who share content.  Likewise, the number of people sharing content pushes the relevancy for that content way up.  Google knows that people don’t typically share garbage at the expense of their own reputation so if content is heavily shared it should be given more weight.

Link building isn’t enough to boost traffic.  Quality content and social media marketing to get that content shared are going to be the two most important factors in making your business and the informative content on your site stand out above competitors.

Does this mean you will falter and fail if your content syndication lacks social oomph and sharing buttons?  Not necessarily.  Quality content is still at the heart of indexing, optimization and social positioning.  With that said, social proof will continue to play a growing part in how businesses, brands and services are found online.  It’s best to develop and implement a sound strategy now rather than try to put fires out later.

Woe to the many who claimed that social media was a passing fad… that it held no majesty in the world of optimization or online positioning for brands.  Marketing on social media?  Eh… it’ll pass.

And then there was Panda.

With the most recent update brought about by Google (Farmer or Panda depending on the name you choose to apply), they have put a massive emphasis on social buzz as a ranking factor – and one of the primary ranking factors at that.  This change comes with good reason.  While the MayDay update of 2010 had Google insisting that social signals were not a ranking factor, many knew that something had to give.

Why Social Buzz is so Important

So why is Google putting all the weight on social sharing through Twitter as well as Facebook ‘likes’?  The primary issue is linking just doesn’t carry the same integrity and power it once held.  Once upon a time linking was favored because the process to get a link and have it placed required some human-dependent interaction and labor (though small).  This meant that it was largely editorial, especially for links gained on other websites. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t make the mistake of coming into Synnd without a clear way to gauge an measure the results you’re getting. You should have some form of analytics on your website or blog. Run a Synnd campaign and watch the resulting traffic and accumulation of traffic from social sources.

It is this traffic that tips off Google’s Caffeine algorithm to index the page. Get more traffic and more social references and watch your rankings climb.

Google Analytics is free and one of the most robust analytics systems on the market

We understand that when you first come into Synnd you want to give it a test drive. You want to see if it actually does what you need before adopting it as part of your mainstream marketing tasks.

Here is an example of how to test Synnd:

1. A Synnd user tested Synnd on an old blog post that had already settled into its rankings (position 36) on Google for the term ‘Get Backlinks’. The post had no new activity and was almost a year old.

2. The user then started a Synnd Bookmarking campaign on the URL:

http://linkvanareviews.com/get-backlinks-how-to-get-560-1020-backlinks-a-day

3. The user then did a light campaign on Twitter to build Social Proof

After the Synnd campaigns the post now sits at position 3 (on Google) for the term ‘Get Backlinks’.

This user also saw an increase in traffic, comments and social actions on this old piece of content. Of course he has analytics (stats) on his blog so he was able to isolate what Synnd was doing VS what was occurring from other sources.

Run your own experiments with Synnd to see what it can do for your rankings.

Another way to test Synnd is to add Social Proof widgets to your website or blog and then run Synnd campaigns to drive up the counts. You will start to see the average time a visitor stays on the page INCREASE. The reason is simple… SOCIAL PROOF …. A crowd always draws a crowd… If new readers see that other readers have found the content valuable then they will stay longer to read your content.

After all, a visitor who does not read or become engaged with your content will not become a prospect or customer… They are worthless.

Use Synnd to build some Social Proof to keep your visitors around longer. Your search engine rankings will also benefit because the length of time visitors stay on a page IS a ranking factor.

Run your own social proof experiment to see the results for yourself.

What does social proof look like?

Synnd currently supports:

• Twitter
• Digg
• StumbleUpon
• Facebook

Add these widgets to your website or blog to show Social Proof to your new visitors.