Gonzo Consulting » marketing socially

More Social Networking Search Engines

admin — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:50:54 +0000

See whos talk and about what

Use Social Media to Rank on Google

admin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 16:49:33 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Find Trending Topics

A few good places to Discover Trending Topics are: Google Trends, Twitter Trending Topics and Yahoo’s Trending Now. All of these tools reveal pop culture, breaking news, and sports. Once you discover a particular trending topic related to your business then determine how you can create unique content that can be indexed by Google and show up in their real-time search results.

Understand your readers

Understand the audience for your content. Find out what do they like? What types of activities do they enjoy? Is are they local? Are your readers Gender/Race/Age Specific? Relate a trending topic to your business and prospects.

Plan Ahead

Know events that will be coming up so you can create content relating your website to event/pop culture event/breaking news evenat. Major events often become the focus of trending topics. These events are planned far in advance so its possible to create content ahead of time and publish it as the events becomes a trending topic.

Break the news

You want to have your finger on the pulse of real-time search and understand what is going that is of interest to your readers. Internet marketer, business owner and blogger, Barry Schwartz recently reported Google’s real-time search results included a “top links” section for the keyword “plane crash” after the tragic news of Poland’s president and over 90 others killed. The Top Links section shows the most popular and authoritative links based on the search query.

Make Social Media An Effective Tool

admin — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 05:24:19 +0000

Social media is a great tool for research as well as customer service. Used effectively social media can improve your profit margin.

There is a flip side is that it can become a distraction when using it as a tool for for employees. Sometmes it’s tough to see how stopping to read twitter or browsing the Facebook News Feed can be productive to business.

Social media is just like any other tool. Used right it can make a major impact or wrong become a time sink. The challenge is to formulae a good strategy to use this as tool and minimize the distractons.

Make a Plan, Set Goals and Execute

The key to making social media a useful tool is to have a specific plan and a goal. Many small companies don’t enter the social media realm with a plan, but instead expect tweets and YouTube videos to equate to more traffic and more sales. That just isn’t how social media works. These are entry points to engage new potential customers providing targeted traffic flow.

Do you need more traffic to your website, or are you looking for more brand awareness? Do you want to prevent bad press before it happens, or are you more interested in creating a community that will generate good press? Decide on the goal first.

Once you have a goal, set a plan. Set up metrics to measure success and implement tools that will help you measure ROI.

Execute. Don’t be afraid to reach out, make mistakes, and be vulnerable. Even if you make a mistake.

Avoiding Social Media as a Distraction

Social media doesn’t have to be a distraction if you set up a few guidelines to avoid the time sink.

- When you need to concentrate on an intensive tasks close social media windows and apps.

- Dont use the tools when your bored. This is for business not recreation.

- Prioritize. Focus on the tasks at hand before using social media to create more.

Personal Branding Is Important

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:33:57 +0000

1. You Cant Hide From Search Engines

Search engines are becoming more and more aggressive as competition has become fierce between Google,Yahoo and Bing. People used to pay Yahoo $300 a few years ago to have their site “priority indexed”. Now its a race between the big 3 to get relevant information into results as fast as a possible. So being aware of how you engage on twitter, facebook and other networks is becoming more important.

2. 8% of People Have Been Fired For Negative Comments About job On Facebook

Online experts are now estimating that 8% of people being fired were not mindful of trivial things they posted about their job.

Entries on facebook can result in loss of income if a manager or potential customer takes exception. Be mindful of what you post on facebook there are people watching!

3. A Twitter prescience is important

Use Twitter make contacts and get your message out but sparingly. Frequent posts to twitter can make you look like you do very little work while no posts may seem like your unaware of its importance. Use Twitter like a front page headline to call attention to things that are potentially important to business and avoid being a chatterbox.

4. Your Social Network Is Potentially Worth Money

People are beginning to look to their friends for recommendations for products and paying less and less attention to ads. Companies are examining to embrace this as a new channel of selling products. If your perceived as a major influencer on a specific genre or region or over a group of people it could mean big bucks for you in the future.

Employers are also starting to look at professional directories like Linkedin and examining the number of relationships and the quality of those people when considering new hires. In many cases they are turning to Linkedin as a quality recruiting tool. Making your personal brand even more crucial in the very near future.

Google searches getting more social (cnn.com)
Social networks drive traffic to retailers and news sites (theequitykicker.com)

Pictures As Part of Your Social Marketing strategy

admin — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:14:05 +0000

Not to many people consider pictures a part of their social bookmarking strategy. But a closer look shows pictures can be an effective usage of social bookmarking as a way to promote your websites.

By submitting your pictures to social media sites you create one-way backlinks and more another way for people to find your site. Take advantage of this qualified traffic by giving your picture a good title and add tags that make it easy to find.

If you have determined that the behavior of your customers is driven my images then Flickr is the most well known and highest trafficked tool. However Flickr is not a bookmarking site but consider the option to vote pictures up or down a part of a typical bookmarking site. There are others, though, that do have that feature included like vi.sualize.us, with a page rank of 5 ripe for one waylinks back!

Once you submit your picture, others can vote your picture up with the “like it” button. The more people that cast their vote the more traffic you are likely to get to your site.

Picfor.me is another typical bookmarking site, with a “pick me” button to make the picture more popular. A great feature at Picfor.me is to you add a bookmark button to your toolbar browser making it very easy to bookmark pictures. Once a picture is bookmarked, you will see that picfor.me logo in the top right hand corner of the picture. There are many others, like incredimazing (PR 4) and typeish (PR 4) worth considering.

Picture book marking is an underutilized way for you to engange your customers with minimal competition.

Put your content to work and increase the visibility of site and the traffic that results from it.

Understand Your Customers

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:05:30 +0000

If you’re considering hiring a social marketing consultant and the core of their pitch consists of “lets develop a twitter or facebook strategy” then you might want to look elsewhere.

Before developing a strategy around using a specific tool or group of tools you must first understand your customers social behaviors.

Customers are adopting new ways to communicate with each other and companies must change in order to reach them. Too many self proclaimed social media consultants pitch a solution based on which tool is the most popular. If you hire a consultant that uses this as a basis for a social media strategy then you will always be chasing after the latest in popular trends.

First you must understand your customer’s behavior.

Here are some things to consider in understanding your customer better

1. Where are your customers online? Which of these communities or services best characterizes their behaviour?

2. What best characterizes your customers behavior on these sites? Do they upload pictures or comment for example?

3. How influential are you customers? Are they seen as reputable or considered an authority in the service your provide by others?

4. How do your customers use social tools in regard to your service? How do they use these tools to research new services or products?

There are more things you can do to understand your customers. The point is these are things a consultant must do prior to identifying any strategy in regards to a specific social marketing tool.

If you have further questions please feel free to comment here or contact me at evilempireinc@gmail.com .