‘social media optimization’

It is the digital age and any business without a solid online presence has to work harder, invest more and wait longer to expand their market share and increase profits. A business needs a website and online marketing campaign to effectively compete with the millions of other businesses in the world. It is possible to simply make use of secondary sites for online promotion such as directories, social media such as Facebook, forums, auction sites, online shopping facilities and blogs to attract the attention of possible customers, but to truly benefit from an online presence a business needs a an online site and a well planned marketing campaign. A few more reasons are provided below as answer to the often asked question of “Why does a business need a website and online marketing campaign?”

Information To Help With Decision Making

Consumers require information to make decisions as to whether or not to make use of a company’s services or to buy a product. A business can hardly be open 24/7, but with a website they can. The website offers the opportunity to give enough information about the company, products, and services, ensure that questions are answered and that the client can get in contact with a representative. The information can be displayed in a visually attractive format and trust can be built through regular online communication.

Convenience For The Consumer

If you are looking for a more convincing answer on the question of “Why does a business need a website and online marketing campaign?” consider the convenience offered. Mr. X doesn’t want to get in his car and drive 10 km, fight traffic, struggle to get a parking spot, wait in line to be served and then have to decide whether or not to buy product A or B under pressure. He loves sitting at home or office and browsing the Net. Email communication is more his style and if he really wants, he can simply call the customer service line. He can make a decision in his own time, place the order and make payment without ever having to go the through the process described earlier.

Mrs Y loves shopping, but uses the website to get more information about the product. She wants to feel the fabric that she will buy and as such uses the website as her first point of decision making. There are many more scenarios that can be described, but the bottom line is that it offers a convenient facility for the consumer. The choice of interaction lies with the consumer, but information, pictures, and feedback opportunities are available 24/7.

Additional Outlet

Having an online presence can be seen as having an additional outlet. It serves as an entry point to your business. Instead of having to be at every exhibition or having to open offices in every possible town, you can have one website and reach consumers around the world. It is thus also a cost effective way of expanding your reach.

Additional Customer Communication

The customer gets another means of communicating with your company through online application forms, ordering facilities, feedback forms, email, chat facilities, forums and blog comments. It becomes a two way street of communication and thus an essential tool for building trust and improving customer relations.

Creates Credibility

While exhibiting at an event or discussing options with a client you may find that the client wants more information. The clients and potential clients often request the website address. If you send an email to a client from a free email address not connected to a valid domain, your correspondence will more than likely be met with some scepticism, but a valid domain and domain based email will build trust with the potential client.

Why Does A Business Need An Online Marketing Campaign?

The second part of the question “Why does a business need a website an online marketing campaign?” has not yet been answered. The online marketing campaign is what ensures visibility. Just as offline marketing is essential to create brand awareness and to let the customers know where your business is and what you offer, you need a solid online marketing campaign to ensure that your website can be found amongst the millions of other online businesses.

Many small business owners create websites and simply think that should do the trick. A few months down the line someone may ask how the website works for them and they will say that it is not worth their while. The reason is straightforward enough – their site doesn’t get enough targeted traffic. It is one thing to optimize the site for search engine placement, but another to ensure that all links stay in working order, a solid rank is obtained and that users will find the site when searching.

An effective online marketing campaign should include a complete mix of marketing techniques. It is essential to establish the goals of online marketing, the budget, expected return on investment, target audience, and general purpose of the website before investing in Internet marketing.

With the digital business world being rather competitive, the website owner cannot afford to use a fly by night approach. It takes time to develop a strong online presence and with the online world changing rapidly attention should be given to the whole package including:

• Website design for easy navigation, readability, information value, and convenience.
• Branding through the website, banners, affiliate marketing, pay per click advertising, social media such as Facebook and Twitter, blogs and search engine visibility.
• Developing good ranking for particular keywords and ensuring relevance.
• Link building for higher ranking.
• Creating sticky content to ensure that the visitor stays longer and finds the site useful.
• Improving user experience through feedback forms, avatars, video content, and information.
• Improving visibility through YouTube channels and Facebook.
• Ensuring accuracy of information and professional display of information.
• Adding social media buttons such as Google +1, Facebook and Twitter.
• Creating a strong AdWords campaign and landing pages for higher sales turnover.
• Building relationships through newsletters.
• Using press releases to announce important business product launches.
• Market analysis and website traffic monitoring with tools such as Google Analytics.

The above elements are only a few of the important aspects of an online marketing campaign that can help to ensure a solid return on marketing spending and thus the growth of the business. In an age where millions of businesses have already shifted their focus to the online market, the question of why does a business need a website and online marketing campaign is almost too obvious. If you have not yet join the ranks of the online business world then do so now by getting immediate professional assistance through iLead Online for optimal success. Contact us for assistance today.

The Google Social Search, which has been available since 2009, has now been globally rolled out. The search tool is already available in 19 languages, but it is only the start. With some powerful updates to the search tool, Google has succeeded in bringing the social media, opinions and organic searches together for a more personalised search experience, which will also influence search results dramatically.

Friend Opinions Will Count

The idea is that in reality people often make decisions based on the opinions of their friends. If a good friend recommends a movie, chances are that you will buy a ticket and also go see it. If you like it you will recommend it to more friends. If not, well, it will get thumbs down from your side and you may be rather outspoken about why to your friends. As such opinion makes a movie sell or fail.

With the Google Social Search then you can connect to what your friends recommend. Linked to the social networks, and with the option of the Google +1 button for easy like which can be made public or kept private, the user is put in the control seat of how search results will ultimately display. Speculations are that in the near future we can expect to see universal search results disappear and only personal search results displayed. What you and I thus see at the search results will differ dramatically, making the work for SEOs just that one extra notch harder.

Several Changes In Search Results

Previously you would have seen a few extra links at the bottom of the search results page which were recommendations of what you may perhaps like. The information was gathered based on your search usage and the limited information collected about your contacts’ search preferences as well as what is generally sought for when someone searches in a similar way. Tweets, Likes, recommendations, and blog items were used in the gathering of information.

Google Social Search Improves Personal Web Experiences

It has changed since the users can now tell Google a bit more about their friends by associating their Google ID with their various social networking sites including Twitter, Flicker and Quora, but unfortunately not yet, the all powerful Facebook. By doing this one then confirms the contacts and information Google has already gathered, enabling Google to deliver information according to friend recommendations and search behaviour.

If you have for instance, followed a tweet on a particular subject earlier, Google may include it in the search results based on the link. Fortunately with the Google Social Search you will be able to see which ones are Social Search results and which ones fit both categories. As such for people not following the opinions of friends they can still get search results not influenced by what others have to say.

If you thus created a tweet on a topic and hundreds or thousands of people follow you on Twitter, then should one of them do a search for a topic related to what you have tweeted about, their search results will differ completely from those who don’t follow you on Twitter for the same search and are not connected to any of your followers.

Broad Contact Networks Will Influence Results

The Google Social Search goes one step further by also including results where information was tagged by a friend about a specific topic. This can help to bring up a small and unknown blog above one of the big news players. As such the search results will no longer favour over optimised pages. Around 18-22% of search results will be changed when using the Google Social Search facility. For SEO this means a whole lot more work and the average website owner may need to make use of SEO companies that also incorporate social media optimization in their product profile.

The tagged social search results can include articles from Google Reader to which you have subscribed, recommended web content by means of the +1 button, profiles of your contacts at social media sites and images which have been shared by your contacts as well as blogs and any content shared by your friends. The tool also enables more results and filtering of results.

Social connections include your connections from:

• Google contacts in the My Contacts group.
• Gmail & Google Talk chat lists.
• People followed on Google Buzz (which may not be a very long list, given the dismal failure of the social media application) and Google Reader.
• Public connections of your public social contacts including the people that your friends follow on Twitter and the additional people that they have connections with.
• Public connections you have at social media sites including FriendFeed.

The content that you publish publicly and share in the same manner will be visible as results for others, but you can remove or add more links to your profile to ensure more or less public display. One must be signed into a Google Account to see the results of Google Social Search. The more you customize your profile by adding for instance, public connected sites, your e-blogger account, and add friends to your My Contacts group as well as subscribe to public content, the more personalised your search results will become. RSS Feeds, Digg, and more can all be included in the results.

On the SEO part of things it is possible to make the most of the Google Social Search for best results by:

• Getting in on the social media frenzy by creating blogs, Facebook personal and business accounts or fan pages, a Twitter account, LinkedIn,  FriendFeed, and MySpace as well as Blogger (e-Blogger BlogSpot). Facebook is not yet connected, but remember that the Facebook users are often also users of other social media which can be important. Be sure to create a profile at the current Google Buzz which may in the future become Google Circles and build a list of contacts. Don’t forget about Google Talk.
• Don’t just create the above accounts, but become active there. You need to post blogs, and post updates. To boost traffic use similar keywords used at your website. Get as many as possible subscribers.
• SEO must be done for your newsletters which can be posted online in addition to sending such out. Get rid of single image based newsletters and exchange the style to text which can be optimized.
• Go with full text RSS feeds as you will want to increase the chances of your subscription feeds showing up in the search results.
• Build your Gmail contact list and be sure to get in on the lists of others.

Google Social Search will change the way that results are displayed and where pages will rank. Contact us at iLead Online to help your website not only survive, but succeed with top rankings in personalised results.

Without contest Facebook is the ruling giant in the land of social media. In fact, comScore Inc. recently did some research in the US to see exactly how Americans spent their time online with astonishing results. According to comScore Inc. the average US Web surfer spends more time socializing on Facebook then searching on Google!

Now for those of us working in the online world this study holds great importance because it completely affects the purpose and position of online marketing. As business owner you can no longer ignore social media as part of your action plan to drive more traffic to your website in order to build a brand name for your company, gain consumer loyalty and essentially ensure ROI growth. Apart from these factors, social media is also a low-cost promotional method that will give you direct and easy access large number of online visitors, i.e. potential clients.

In December 2009 Google launched their “real-time search” which allowed the indexing of information as they were happening on the web. This included their collaboration with Facebook updates, Twitter feeds, Blog posts, Google News feeds, Yahoo! Answers and last but not least, MySpace feeds, thus allowing Google users to get the latest results on various “Hot Topics”. The main reason why this change was introduced was for the obvious reason that social media is a rich source of information. More than that is how it allows businesses to tap into the opinions and insights of online users, thus giving you an edge when it comes to online marketing. But first, let’s look at the leading social media websites and networks out there:

Facebook

As stated before Facebook has rapidly grown into the leading social networking site the world has ever seen and causing many ripple effects along the way. While MySpace holds onto a meagre 5.0% of the market share, Facebook controls approximately 24%, which is more than double the amount of its closest competitor in the form of emails (11.1%), thus making it the main place users go to to share content. The key factor though is how easy Facebook makes it for you to promote your company whilst connecting with users in a personal and trustworthy manner.

When you eventually come to the realisation that no online business strategy is complete without a Facebook fan page, then consider your options of how you should go about doing so. You can either do it yourself (which requires a keen knowledge of HTML) OR you can call in the professionals to create a killer fan page for you to include such things as a fabulous design to suit your branding, and Blog feeding into your fan page. Of course the simplest thing to do is give us a call and we can help you with the whole package that includes both search engine (SEO) and social media optimization.

Then there are the demographics. Facebook allows you to advertise to a very specific market. This means that you are able to choose whether your ad should be shown to male or female, old or young, single or married Facebook users. But you can be even more particular than this. Looking for users who, for example, show some interest in pets? No problem. Facebook will be able to pin down and advertise to users that used or referenced specific details, like a love of their beloved dog Rover, allowing you to directly get in touch with your target market.

Twitter

This free social networking and microblogging website is, aside from Facebook, a hot favourite amongst internet users. In 2009 Nielsen reported that this social media platform attracted 21million unique visitors giving it a near 2000% increase year-over-year. With an average of up to 370,000 new users signing up daily, Twitter made it public that they plan to redesign the website so that their millions of users may find it easier to search and navigate.

A lot of Twitter followers access their account by way of text messages, mobile phone- and desktop applications. In hindsight this means that the number of Twitter users is actually higher. For business owners it provides the chance to build and sustain relationships with their existing clientele as well as reach new potentials.

The drawing attraction of Twitter is that things are kept short and sweet, thus allowing users to quickly and frequently update their own messages, or tweets which are restricted to 140 characters, as well as respond to those they follow. As business owner it gives you the unique opportunity to interact and share information with your followers, thus allowing your company or brand to maintain top of mind awareness as well as establish it as a leader of opinions. Moreover, the Google spiders pick up on tweets which in turn help to drive more traffic to your website.

A Few Other Social Media Applications

Apart from Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, companies can also use YouTube to their advantage. This video sharing application draws much attention and have proven to give unknowns the time of day they wouldn’t have had otherwise; case in point Die Antwoord. This South African band was an unknown until their music video “Enter the ninja” spread like wildfire amongst online viewers and eventually got them a record deal with an American record company. You can easily integrate it as part of your online marketing strategy by uploading optimized videos about your product or service, thus allowing your consumers to have a quick and easy video access whilst using the SEO factor to your advantage.

Bookmarking has never been as pleasing since del.icio.us made its appearance. While links from sites such as del.icio.us aren’t really worth much from a search engine perspective – you can’t optimize like one would normally as their robots use “noarchive, nofollow, noindex” Meta tags – they do however still drive quite a bit of traffic to websites when used correctly. You can achieve this by means of tagging pages with the relevant keywords. Let’s use the example of pets again. When submitting your blog post about training your dog, be sure to post it to your del.icio.us account and tag keywords like “dog training”, “obedience training”, and “dog training tips”. Automatically these pages will have their own RSS feed which readers, such as bloggers, will tap into, as well as individuals interested in the particular topic. This not only heightens your chance for more online exposure, but also better your click-through rates, and if your content is good, the possibility that the reader will link their website with your own.

Finally, to bring our post to its conclusion, it becomes evident that social media applications hold many benefits in that they not only can, but will assure you a great online presence. Yes they will require a little more attention and effort, but if done correctly you, your brand and company will most definitely be able to reap the benefits – especially with the help of a professional online company such as iLeadOnline. So the question you should be asking yourself is not whether or not you should include social media as part of your online marketing campaign, but rather why haven’t you already?