Social Media Optimisation- what to include in your strategy

As mentioned in the past few weeks, I've recently been working on a social media strategy and I'd like to share what I think are some essential elements to include for any business wanting to enter this vastly complex and ever changing area of online marketing. I don't intend this to be a definitive list, the be all end all of social media, but I think it represents a good mix of activities:

1 - Push strategy:

• Publish articles / content syndication: distribute your keyword rich content as widely as possible across the web through online article submission websites such as amazines, e-articles....
• Social bookmarking: encourage people to bookmark your content in websites such as digg, reddit, delicious, twitter....you can achieve this by publishing link worthy content on your site and add social bookmark buttons (explanations here)
  Create your own social bookmark accounts and tag your own articles to increase distribution
• RSS feeds: Create an RSS feed for your site and update it as regularly as possible. Distribute your feed and encourage signups with buttons on site.
  It is also advisable to link your feed to social media sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook
• Content distribution automation: try and automate as much of the processes as possible by developing website apps that will automatically sync your website with your social media tools (rss, twitter, social bookmakrs, blogs...)
• Social networking: it seems obvious, but you need to create individual accounts on each of the social media main sites (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace) The sites you regsiter on will depend on your tagret audience and its demographics
• Microblogging: Tweet as often as possible!
• Blogs: Build relationships with influential bloggers in your industry and try and publish your content on the blogs whenever possible as this will giv eyou some authority in the market
  
• Rich media: Use rich media such as videos to widen your appeal and distribute video content such as tutorials, guides on sites such as youtube

2 - Pull strategy:

• Link baiting: create link worthy contenton your site to attract visitors and increase your link popularity and make it as easy to syndicate as possible (buttons, feed...)
• Widgets: If you have the budget, create a downloadable widget for your site but be creative!
• Blogs: a blog is the perfect way to demonstrate what you do in a less formal environment that a corporate website. It can also become the hub of all your social media activities (and also help you search engine rankings)
• Forums: Engage and respond on a regular basis. If people talk about you in a forum ,whether it is negative or positive, make sure that you're there to respond.
  Use the forums to advise people and don't be too pushy, remember that customers like to talk, so listen!
• Viral campaigns / buzz marketing: viral marketing is a very tricky art to master, but if you get it right it could be worthwhile.

As you can see there are a lot of things to take into account when doing SMO (and I'm sure i've missed some too) but one thing to remember is that a good social media strategy will only work as a aprt of an overall integrated online marketing strategy. And as usual, tracking and reporting is key as you need to put your resources towards the most effective channel, so measure, measure and measure results to make sure you do the right thing.

Social media optimisation - helpful tools

Since I've been working on a social media strategy recently (I'll post more details soon), I thought I'd share some tools which I think could be useful to anybody managing their own SMO.

The first one is a social boomarking tool called Social Marker (http://www.socialmarker.com/). While some people may not think of social bookmarks sites as part of a social media strategy, they are a great way to syndicate your content using your own tags, especially when combined with buttons on your site.
The best feature of Social Marker is that it allows you to bookmark your content on all of the main social bookmarks sites at the click of a button (including delicious, reddit, digg, stumble upon...). Initial set up may take a while as you need to register individually on each of the sites, but once this is done, everything will be very straightforward.
When used with free social buttons (www.addthis.com), your social bookmarking efforts will never be the same again!

The next tool is a video upload service that allows you to upload your rich media on a wide range of video sites at the click of a button. The principle is the same as social marker with a slightly long initial setup (need to register on sites such as youtube, dailymotion...) and simplicity afterwards. Tube Mogul (http://www.tubemogul.com/) also gives you in depth analysis for each of your videos, allowing you to understand users behaviour across the sites.

Because social media can be extremely time consuming, it is becoming essential for any internet marketeer to automate a lot of the tasks. This can be a simple link between a blog/rss feed and twitter (http://twitterfeed.com/) but it can also mean developing apps that will automatically distribute new content from a website to sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Blogs, Twitter....I'm sure a few tools are readily available online, but bespoke solutions can be ideal if you have the web development resources.

Ok, so now you have the right tools to start implementing your strategy, but how do you measure it? While it is hard to find any free integrated social media effectiveness reporting tools, a few tips can help you measure basics fairly easily.
If you use google analytics, you can create a new segment to compare social media results with other marketing channels (paid, organic..) Instructions here. Being a bit of a Google Analytics fan myself, I can only highly recommend Brian Clifton's blog, Measuring Success.

Ploked.com also gives some really good info on which metrics you should use when measuring social media activities.

While I'm sure most of you enjoy spending time using social media, I think it is very important for any business to make the most out of this wonderful internet marketing channel by planning its growth and carefully measuring results.
Enjoy your weekend!

Twitterfeed...it's about time!

Ok, time for me to get into the social media age....today, I'm trying Twitterfeed with my blog. I've got to admit that a post was long overdue, but hey I've been busy getting married, working hard on SEO, PPC, web analytics and other marketing fun recently