Optimizing Social Media - Part 3

Optimizing social media can easily be a full-time job.

As I discussed in Part 1 of this series, Intro to Social Media Marketing, spending large quantities of time chasing down social traffic is not time well spent for the small business owner.

Before discussing general methods for optimizing social media, please be aware that social marketing should never be the primary method of marketing your business.

Your long-term strategy should always be to increase your natural organic search traffic by building great content based on profitable keywords and by obtaining high-quality inbound links.

Part 2 of this series, Social Media Tips, discussed three primary strategies for marketing your website via the social networks. This article, the final part of the series, will discuss more general strategies for optimizing social media.

Strategy #1: Write Relevant Content

If there's one "trick" for optimizing social media, it's this. Find out what is important to your target market and write about it on your website. Most people don't think of this as a social media strategy, but if your content is poor, you won't stand a chance attracting social traffic.

The widespread use of the nofollow tag (which tells the search engines not to value a link) means that marketers need to appeal to social communities through interesting and diverse (but targeted) content.

Whenever possible, you should base your web page content on a single main keyword that is profitable. A profitable keyword is one that has a decent monthly search volume (aka Demand) but not a lot of competition (aka Supply.)

You can uncover high-demand low-supply keywords by using a professional keyword research tool like Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery.

Strategy #2: Lipstick on a Pig

You've probably heard the phrase, "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig."

The same concept applies to websites. You can't improve poor content by using flashy graphics and colors.

Conversely, if you have great content, but an ugly design, you may find the social traffic you attract is quick to leave you behind. In many ways, social media is a popularity contest. To gain an edge, you need great content as well as an appealing design.

Make sure your pages load quickly and that your design is clean, professional and appealing to the eye. In the social media world, a questionable color scheme on your site can actually turn away visitors.

Strategy #3: Give Something Away

I know of one blogger that developed an incredible amount of traffic and inbound links by designing and offering free social media buttons she personally designed.

She submitted the page containing these graphic buttons to various social media sites. The page quickly went viral and ended up having thousands of people linking back to her free graphics page.

She developed enough high-quality inbound links from this that it helped her organic search traffic enormously, even though the initial flurry of social media traffic died down.

The bottom line is this. Find out what cool tools can help your web visitors and then create an free offering around this need. Write a short article about it and submit it to relevant social sites. Place a bookmark to this page on all your public profiles as well.

This can be a great way to not only flush in social traffic, but to offer a real benefit to visitors. If a visitor finds value in your offer, they may sign up for your newsletter or purchase one of your products or services.

Strategy #4: Keep It Real

Optimizing social media is more about keeping it real than about some secret trick or tactic.

Your motivation when working with social sites must be to help. You must be willing to give before you take.

If you can't do this, your social marketing efforts will simply fail in the long run.

Do Not:

Spam social media sites
Bookmark all your web pages
Spend your time arguing

Do:

Give away valuable content
Help answer questions
Become a resource

Strategy #5: LinkedIn

Of all the social sites out there for the small business owner, I'm singling out LinkedIn for special consideration.

While LinkedIn may contain fewer features than other social sites, there's an advantage to creating a profile. Think of LinkedIn as Facebook for professionals.

One of the biggest advantages of creating a profile on LinkedIn is that links pointing back to your site are counted by the search engines. LinkedIn, as of this writing, does not use the nofollow tag.

I have written a special article on Getting Started With LinkedIn.

Conclusion

Spending a few hours a week optimizing social media may make sense for your business. Just remember, Social networking is simply one tactic in a comprehensive small business marketing plan.

Don't get caught up in the newest flavor of the month. If you find yourself overwhelmed by all the social sites and unable to devote much time to it, focus on developing new keyword-based content for your website.

Personally, I choose not to chase down social traffic. I have found, for my market, social traffic does not convert well. However, you may find it has value for the types of products and services you offer.

The only way to know how valuable social traffic might be for your personal situation is to spend a little time working on the techniques described, and monitor the behavior of your social traffic using a program like Google Analytics.

Ultimately, the best bet for any small business is to develop sustainable long-term organic search traffic.