The Power of Social Media Marketing

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What is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing refers to the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites. Social media marketing programs usually center on efforts to create content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share it with their social networks.

Social media itself is a catch-all term for sites that may provide radically different social actions. For instance, Twitter is a social site designed to let people share short messages or “updates” with others. Facebook, in contrast is a full-blown social networking site that allows for sharing updates, photos, joining events and a variety of other activities.

How Are Search & Social Media Marketing Related?

Why would a search marketer — or a site about search engines — care about social media? The two are very closely related.

Social media often feeds into the discovery of new content such as news stories, and “discovery” is a search activity. Social media can also help build links that in turn support into SEO efforts. Many people also perform searches at social media sites to find social media content. Social connections may also impact the relevancy of some search results, either within a social media network or at a ‘mainstream’ search engine.

As long as you think of search and social media as separate projects and place them in silos, you won’t see the maximum impact for your business. Create a cross-functional process between the search and social so that you can integrate the search learning into social media, and the social media learning into search. The search keywords, social conversations, and the target audience behaviors are some of the key information that you should be sharing between the two.

The Bottom Line

It’s vital that you understand social media marketing fundamentals. Besides increasing brand awareness and establishing the legitimacy of the brand, social media marketing can affect the bottom line of a business by increasing sales. Learning about the importance of social media for marketing should also underscore why these efforts need to be continuous and the harm it does when social media marketing isn’t up to consumer expectations. Long story short, social media marketing is something that every business needs to do and needs to do well.

An integrated social media platform can enhance marketing campaign effectiveness, help improve brand building across the enterprise, and make a real impact on sales and the bottom line. Integrated social capability brings another great benefit by keeping the enterprise updated with the latest innovations in social media. Sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn are constantly innovating and updating their collaboration tools, content-sharing formats, etc. With integrating social capability, customers don’t need to change business functions in sales or marketing to catch up with these changes.

In today’s much-hyped world of social media marketing, integrated social capability can make a direct and positive impact on the business. Leveraging the power of content and social media marketing can help elevate your audience and customer base in a dramatic way. But getting started without any previous experience or insight could be challenging. Speak to an expert today at Onimod Global to learn how YOU can leverage your company’s social media marketing.

Google Webmaster: Tie your sites together with property sets in Search Console

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Mobile app, mobile website, desktop website — how do you track their combined visibility in search? Until now, you’ve had to track all of these statistics separately. Search Console is introducing the concept of “property sets,” which let you combine multiple properties (both apps and sites) into a single group to monitor the overall clicks and impressions in search within a single report.

It’s easy to get started:

  1. Create a property set
  2. Add the properties you’re interested in
  3. The data will start being collected within a few days
  4. Profit from the new insights in Search Analytics!

Property Sets will treat all URIs from the properties included as a single presence in the Search Analytics feature. This means that Search Analytics metrics aggregated by host will be aggregated across all properties included in the set. For example, at a glance you’ll get the clicks and impressions of any of the sites in the set for all queries.

This feature will work for any kind of property in Search Console. Use it to gain an overview of your international websites, of mixed HTTP / HTTPS sites, of different departments or brands that run separate websites, or monitor the Search Analytics of all your apps together: all of that’s possible with this feature.

Don’t just listen to us, here’s what we heard from one of the beta-testers:

It was one of my most important demands since the beginning of Webmaster Tools / Search Console. And I love the way it is given to us. I see that the remarks of beta-testers have also been understood by Google engineers. So thank you so much! — Olivier Andrieu (Abondance)

Google will be rolling this out over the next couple of days. If you have multiple properties verified in Search Console, we hope this feature makes it easier for you to keep track. If you have any questions, feedback, or ideas, visit Google in the webmaster help forum, or read the help documentation for this new feature!

Tweets May Soon Breeze Past 140-Character Limit

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In an effort to better monetize its platform and boost user traffic, Twitter may relax the 140-character limit on individual tweets by no longer counting photos and Web links, Bloomberg reported earlier this week.

The tweak could take place within two weeks, according to the story, which cited an unnamed source who asked for anonymity because the decision had not yet been made public.

CEO Jack Dorsey hinted at the move earlier this year when he tweeted an elaborate screenshot containing more than 1,300 characters.

The company reportedly was considering expanding the maximum tweet size to as many as 10,000 characters.

Raising the character limit would make a stronger case for increasing user engagement on Twitter, Dorsey said.

“We’ve spent a lot of time observing what people are doing on Twitter, and we see them taking screenshots of text and tweeting it,” he said. “Instead, what if that text was actually text? Text that could be searched. Text that could be highlighted. That’s more utility and power.”

Twitter did not begin with a 140-character limit, Dorsey noted. It instituted the limit in order to fit into a single SMS message, which has a 160-character limit.

Link Letters

Links chew up about 23 characters per tweet. Eliminating links and images from the mix would encourage members to post more images and allow them to write in something that approximates whole sentences.

“The move by Twitter is a nice refinement, but not a breakthrough move,” said Kevin Krewell, principal analyst at Tirias Research. “It will make it easier for users to share more content, but doesn’t change Twitter’s fundamental problem attracting new users.”

The company is still having difficulty attracting new users and increasing the utility for existing members.

By not counting photos and links, Twitter will make it less cumbersome for users to post photos with their tweets, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. The tools used to shorten links often break anyway, creating more difficulty in generating traffic.

“Removing annoyances should get people to use the service more and for tweets to be more informative and more interesting,” he said.

Traffic Booster

While the move should help increase traffic and help Twitter compete against services such as Instagram, there is a downside risk that it will put a strain on devices used to read longer tweets, said Mike Jude, program manager at Stratecast/Frost & Sullivan.

“A principal virtue of Twitter is its small footprint and easy consumption… This will erode that to some extent, but people like photos, and I think this will be popular.”

Twitter reported an average of 310 million active monthly users during the first quarter, an increase of 3 percent from the year-ago quarter.

twitter-tweet-140-character-limit

H/T: E-Commerce Times

The #1 Reason Why Position #1 Doesn’t Matter

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That’s right — position #1, the elusive goal for so many SEOs, may not matter so much anymore. Crazy statement, right? Trust me… follow me for just a minute.

The screen shot below shows what Google refers to as a featured snippet, also known as a direct answer. (It’s also one I searched recently when baking, realizing I forgot to buy self-rising flour and hoping I wouldn’t have to go back to the store. Anyway, moving on… )

http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2016/04/self-rising_flour_direct_answer.png

As you can see, the direct answer information is displaying above the initial search result. I don’t even have to click on the link to find the answer I need. I’m able to see that if I pull the baking powder and salt out of the cupboard, I can save myself a trip to the store.

While this is great for the end user, it means that MyRecipes.com provided me the information I needed, but I never visited their site. In many instances, however, the consumer is still going to visit the website because they need more information than what’s displayed in the direct answer.

So why does position #1 not matter as much? While the direct answer shown above does come from the #1-ranked website for the search query, it doesn’t always work this way. The direct answer is pulled from the site with the best answer, and Google doesn’t seem to care how it’s ranked.

In the example below, the featured snippet has been pulled from the #3-ranked result. (Not that I’ve ever searched this particular query in a sleep-deprived moment during the past year… )

http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2016/04/when-will-baby-sleep-direct-answer.png

Can you imagine the difference in traffic for the #3 result with the direct answer vs. the #1 result without? Normally, the top organic ranking would have the highest click-through rate; however, the direct answer is likely taking traffic from the top result here (if not getting the majority of the clicks).

It’s important to optimize the content on all of your properties, not just your website. Yes, you really do need to include full content descriptions on your social profiles, because you never know what Google’s going to deem the best candidate for a direct answer.

In the example below, Google has chosen a featured snippet from a video on Pottery Barn’s YouTube channel for the search query, “how to hang drapes.” A page from Pottery Barn’s website that contains tips and how-tos for hanging drapes is #1 in the SERP — but because they’ve optimized their YouTube video description, it’s been selected as the direct answer. This benefits Pottery Barn in the long run, because now they have more real estate above the fold.

 

The video is embedded in their website, along with additional supporting content on hanging drapes. Pottery Barn’s how-to guides provide a great information resource for customers, and that’s likely why Google’s rewarding them with both the featured snippet and the #1 position in the SERP.

http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2016/04/how-to-hang-drapes-direct-answer_1.png

The featured snippet is pulled from the video description on YouTube:

http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2016/04/how-to-hang-drapes-direct-answer.png

So, what does all of this have to do with your SEO content strategy? When you provide useful information that’s easy to follow and understand, it could be used as a featured snippet in Google search results. If that happens, you will likely see a boost in traffic to your site — perhaps even more than the top organic result.

If you have optimized your site and your social channels, you can potentially gain a bigger portion of the SERP landscape through the featured snippet and position #1 ranking. However, even without #1, if you have the featured snippet, you are essentially the new #1.

Now that you understand the reward, you need to determine how to go after the direct answers. Start by searching Google for some of your target keywords (especially long-tail variations that take the form of a question) and find out if these queries trigger a featured snippet.

If these searches do produce direct answers, look at the sites that are obtaining them and evaluate what they’re doing differently. If you have the right information on your site to answer the query, double-check your setup. Do you have a dedicated page for each question with comprehensive, high-quality content? Or do you answer the question as part of a larger FAQ page? You may need to make some changes in order to win the featured snippet placement.

Direct answers are still relatively new, and they’re not on all queries. You may find that they’re starting to add them for queries related to your vertical, but the number of questions being answered is limited. Remember, even if a particular query doesn’t trigger a direct answer now, it may in the future — so you can always start creating content with that in mind.

Keep in mind that featured snippets are more commonly found on informational queries rather than transactional ones, so optimizing your content for direct answers will primarily be for the purpose of capturing searchers at the top of the funnel. In other words, plan your content accordingly; don’t try to use product pages to obtain featured snippets unless it’s appropriate to do so.

Position #1 isn’t as important as being the direct answer. Focus on creating great content that’s useful to your audience, and target the queries that would send someone to your site. While simple answers such as “what is a substitute for self-rising flour” may not drive tons of traffic, queries like “how to hang drapes” will likely drive traffic and quite possibly revenue in time.

http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2014/08/seo-blocks-ss-19201-800x450.jpg

H/T: Search Engine Land.