From the folk at www.utalkmarketing.com
Social media is the hottest topic in digital and an essential part of every brands digital armoury. From Facebook and Twitter to blogs and facilitators, social media has inspired some of the most creative innovative and creative campaigns of the past year. Social media has become more than an after-thought, it is now a part of every successful marketing campaign.
Social media has also led to the empowerment of consumers. Users have become the driving force of the internet: they talk about our products to each other behind our backs, and we can no longer control the story they tell.
If you want to know more, UTalkMarketing are running a Social Media Skills Accelerator course for one day in July. For now, here are the top ten tops for how to get people talking about your brand online.
1. Get your news seen and heard
Around 70% of website traffic is driven via natural search so the ability to be ‘found’ is vital. Make sure your website is optimised for Google (this will be explored in detail in a separate article) and make sure you are writing things that you know your audience like to read about.
two. Get into Google news
Google news is 1 of the most overlooked sources for web traffic online, especially as they have more than enough users to significantly boost your sites traffic once you’re listed. To be included, you need a regularly updated news site (updated at least a few times a week for the past three months).
three. Make your website work harder
A key objective of both online PR and social media marketing is to drive qualified traffic to your website. You shouldn’t just drive people to your site – you need a plan of action into what you want to do once they get there. This is where you are turning PR into lead generation. Do you want them to register for your news alerts, read something, buy something? How are you going to get them to do what you want?
four. Become a contributor
There are massive opportunities online to get involved and actively contribute to the online conversation, including blogging. You should begin a corporate blog so you can talk to your audience to reinforce brand values, keep people up to date and show your expert opinion. However, you need to find a balance with being interesting and just showing off!
There are plenty of other places you can contribute – whether you are an ‘expert’ on someone else’s blog or platform, a content contributor and so on.
five. Being a good chatterer
The online world is all about collaboration and the exchange of opinions and ideas. Online discussion (whether forums, blogs) are a great way to get talking and also to get feedback from your customers. Don’t just put your opinion out there, link to interesting posts from other bloggers, and adding their blogs to your blogroll. Share and share alike – don’t just force your opinion on others!
six. Use community driven websites like Digg
Digg.com is a community-driven news site. The idea is that you submit articles from your website which the users will wither ‘dig’ or ‘bury’ depending on how they rate it. Stories with the most Digs end up on the front page. Sites that get their story on the front page can get up to 50,000 hits on their page in one day.
Rather than conversions, the real value of the traffic from Digg is indirect. It comes from the big amount of visitors who will mention your article in their blogs and link to you. It is these links which will help your article, and whole site, rank higher in search engines.
Other similar sites:
- Fark
- Del.icio.us
- Stumbleupon
seven. Publish RSS feeds
Creating website RSS feeds is a great way of letting subscribers know that new content is available. This is an increasingly popular way to access the latest news, enabling key audiences to ‘pull’ content according to what interests them. And it’s not hard to do!
eight. Create profiles
Any website that you can create an account on will work. An amazon reviewers account is a good example, making sure you use your business name as your account name. As the review pages are sub-pages of the Amazon goliath, they tend to rank pretty highly in search engines, especially for non-competitive keywords such as business names.
Other sites such as Myspace, Friendster, Flickr and Geocities are good examples of websites where you can create your own profile.
9. Tag your content appropriately
Tags are keywords that categorise your content and enable it to be found online. You can tag your news releases, blog posts, or photos – anything that you want to make easy for you and other people to find online.
10. Reputation management
Online reputation management is the business of monitoring what the marketplace is saying about your brand. It also means responding to situations before they run out of control. Venues include blogs, discussion threads, forums and social networking sites.
Monitoring how consumers talk about your brand can provide premature warning signs for treatment or service issues as well as promotion opportunities that can be leveraged.
If you want to know more, UTalkMarketing are running a Social Media Skills Accelerator course in July. Covering everything from the social media landscape, key trends and behaviours to campaign planning and measurement through a combination of case studies and industry knowledge, this course is the ultimate social media ‘how to guide.’ Contact daniel@utalkmarketing.com for more details or to hear about our Digital PR Skills Accelerator course.
www.utalkmarketing.com is the first B2B user generated content site for the client marketing community set up by Niall Mckinney, ex Chief Marketing Officer for lastminute.com.
