Editor's Notes

Best Kept SMM Secrets and Strategies Revealed by Marketing Experts

Social media has revolutionized personal communication and changed the way of doing business, marketing products, and branding. This huge shift requires new approaches and reconsideration of the current marketing strategies.

If you want to be on the crest of the social media wave, then read on the opinions of 6 well respected SEO and Social Media Marketing professionals who share insights and their best kept secrets on how to pave the road to Social Media success.

Question: What is Social Media Marketing? Are your clients asking you to provide them with a social media optimization strategy?  What social media tools and tactics do you usually apply?

Scott Buresh

Social media marketing can be two things – 1. marketing on the social media website itself, such as with your company’s banners and other similar advertisements, or 2. performing and implementing strategic marketing for the social media website as one of your clients, i.e. highlighting what it can do for a user. Most clients inquire about social media marketing, wondering what it can do to boost their rankings. Medium Blue is currently exploring its value to SEO, and we’re devising potential tactics that may help clients receive the results they are looking for.

Roger Janik

I think that many people in our industry would define social media marketing as using social networking sites and user content created sites for purposes of creating brand awareness, to increase visitors to their site and become overall more relevant in the search engine rankings.  While social media marketing is fairly new- even to our industry, it has become quite successful.  In fact, savvy companies outside of SEO and the web are becoming aware that it can be an effective strategy for certain companies looking to market their products or website online.  

While there are a wide variety of tactics that a search engine marketing company can employ, I would first recommend a comprehensive SEO strategy with a social marketing component.  Alone, social media marketing right now is not enough for long term growth and higher rankings.  However saying this, I would suggest anyone considering a social marketing strategy to first dive in and learn about the many social marketing sites. 

Hugo Guzman

When I’m asked this question, I always bring up a funny little analogy. Asking for a social media optimization proposal is like asking for an “online marketing” proposal. What’s the mean? Email, SEO, SEM, display, creative, development?

In other words, the term “Social Media Marketing” is way too broad and generic. What we’re doing for clients is identifying very specific needs, Social Network media buying, social media data mining, reputation management, corporate blog development, etc. and then delving down even deeper into those sub-categories to identify very specific goals and deliverables that focus on ROI as well as brand affinity.

Alan Rabinowitz

Social Media to me, is a very broad term and can mean anything from dating, rock band promotion, chatting with friends, and even a way of promoting yourself or your firm to a group of active people looking for something similar or who basically do the same thing.

We get very little call for social media optimization strategy because many of our clients are focused mainly on their rankings from a Search Engine perspective and to us, the two mix well but are not 100% necessities.

We offer all our clients blog education, user (meaning employee) account marketing and guide them to using some tools to their benefit. We believe that the firms should consider doing this actively so they can personalize it and put the right message online.

Milind Mody

Social Media Marketing is promoting a business by interacting and engaging with people using social media channels. Yes. A lot of our clients are interested in Social Media optimization. For example one of our clients is a New York based laser surgeon. He had a video which showed how he can reshape your nose without using a knife. We started promoting this video in YouTube. Due to universal search, this video also started ranking on few surgery-related keywords on Google. The result was increase in requests and more importantly an increase in number of people opting for this surgery. We also create viral videos for our clients.

Other strategies include using Social Networking (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn), Social Bookmarking (Delicious, Furl, StumbleUpon), Social News and community websites (Digg, Yahoo Buzz), Presentation websites (SlideShare), Creating Social Hub sites (Squidoo Lens, Hub Pages). But each client and business needs separate strategy. As for tactics, before starting any campaign, ensure that you have friends in each of the communities you want to target.

Brian Reiff

Social Media marketing is best defined by Wikipedia as with most of their definitions. According to Wikipedia “Social media marketing is the process of promoting a site, business or brand through social media channels by engaging and interacting with existing consumers or potential consumers.” This is the hottest service that we are offering to our clients today and approximately 35% of all new leads and business has some form of social media attached to it.

Question : How does social media affect SEO? How much weight do the search engines give links from social media sites? Do some sites have more weight?

Read on the answers of our 6 experts.

Nominate Your Favorite Internet Marketing Company for ”Best of 2008” Award

PromotionWorld, a leading destination for website promotion and internet marketing, announced the beginning of the competition for the third “Best of the Year” awards and opened nominations for the “Readers’Choice” category.

Inspired by the success of previous years, PromotionWorld will once again recognize the innovators and leaders in the industry and will honor those companies that are prominent and excel in their respective business sector.

The scope of this year's awards has been expanded to cover the increased demand for new SEM services. For that purpose, PromotionWorld has complemented the well-known "Best SEO Company" awards with three new categories reflecting the rapid developments in the internet marketing in the past twelve months.

For the first time, PromotionWorld is presenting a brand new category "Readers' Choice" in which companies will compete for the vote of our readers. Any company can nominate itself, and anyone can nominate a company.

Nominate a company for Readers' Choice Award now!

Nominations close on December 15th. On December 16th voting will go live and it will be open to all visitors of the website.

Two more sites from the DevStart network will be publishing award listings and are also running a Readers' Choice Award campaign.

HostReview, the most popular web hosting directory, will accept nominations at http://www.hostreview.com/top10year.html.

DomainInformer, the all-inclusive resource for anyone interested in domain names, runs its Readers' Choice award at http://www.domaininformer.com/top10year2008.html .

PromotionWorld Top 10 SEO Awards

Best SEO Company 1 SEO Inc. 2 SEO Image 3 Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing 4 ServerSideDesign 5 Oneupweb more »

News

Recent Articles

Is Personalized Search Really Ending Search Engine Optimization?
by Jason Bland
For those of you with a Google Account, your search results have already changed. You can move rankings, comment on sites, and shift what you are looking for. Should search engine optimization specialists be heading for the unemployment line? [more]

Yahoo Microsoft Saga
by Brian Cooper
When we last left Yahoo!, Jerry Yang (CEO) and the rest of the board had just spurned Microsoft's $44.6 billion takeover bid for the supposedly greener pastures of potential deals with AOL, News Corporation, and/or Google. The rejection of Microsoft's bid also put the current board on a collision course with Carl Icahn in what looked to be a battle for control of Yahoo!'s board of directors. [more]

Blog Marketing With Web 2.0
by Avtar Singh Saini
Web 2.0 is basically a bunch of new Internet software features that can help you in your Internet business. I'm sure you've heard of some basic Web 2.0 features such as the RSS, podcasts, social bookmarking and social networking. If not, do read up more on them because these strategies are being practically used by a lot of Internet marketers trying to make their way in the world of the Internet. [more]

What Is White Hat SEO And Black Hat SEO
by BR SANKHLA
In white hat SEO techniques, the site content is crafted keeping in consideration the guidelines set forth by the search engines for effective SEO services. They abide by the rules laid down and play it safe. White hat methods are the legal technique of search engine optimization. [more]

Top Five Things To Know When Choosing An Open Source Content Management System (CMS)
by Pooja Gupta
If you are looking at getting your site up and running quickly, manage the site yourself without a need for a programmer and of course what to spend as little as possible then going in for a content management based web site is the answer for you. There are many opensource Content Management Systems available so which one is right for you? This article lists the five most important aspects to consider when deciding on an open source content management system to use. [more]

How We Should Be Thinking About Display Advertising - Part Two
by Brian Brown
In this second installment, we will cover some specific technologies and tactics that can be used to improve the effectiveness of your display advertisements. [more]

Send Feedback

Elsewhere on the DevStart Network

And the semi-finalists for the Idea Cafe Innovation and Originality Grant are...

DevStart, Inc. 64 Orland Square Drive, Orland Park, Illinois, 60462

Sections

Advertisement

Recommended Services