I love it when readers contact me with social media questions. It allows me to share some of the things I’ve learned using social media. And I can show you how to avoid the mistakes I’ve made.
This week I received the following question:
Q. My only question about LinkedIn is are we actually able to advertise our business among the groups?
This is a great question!
Mistake to Avoid: You don’t want to come off to other readers as giving a strong sales pitch for your business. All mentions of your business should contribute to the conversation or point readers to useful information.
Here are two strategies that can work well when participating in group discussions on LinkedIn.
1. Direct traffic to your blog post While in the discussion area, post a discussion about an issue in your business and then provide a link to your site. For instance, I could start a discussion about how to use LInkedIn to establish your company’s brand, then provide a link to my blog post on the topic for viewers to read more if they are interested in the subject.
But what if you don’t have a blog? Here is another strategy:
2. Ask the group for input. If I am a human resource consultant, I could ask the question, “What are some of your challenges when hiring subcontractors?” This would start a discussion on a topic I am knowledgeable about and allow me to provide useful information in the discussion. I can also provide a link to my website or email if readers have further questions for me.
Have you tried one of these strategies before? Did you finding it a good way to connect with more people? Leave me a comment.
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Before I started using social media, if I Googled my name, I would find about four listings for a couple sites where I’d written an article or two, and results from 5K road races I’d run. That was it. Most of the other entries on the page were about other people with my name. One is a doctor. I wonder if anyone has mistakenly thought I was a doctor. That would be uber cool.
As I opened my business, Tekkbuzz Internet Marketing, I knew, if I was going to have any success as a business, I needed to be found when people Googled my name or the name of my business. I, of course, started my blog, adding posts each week about social media. I made sure I used keywords in my post titles, such as social media, entrepreneurs, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
As a social media consultant, I am active every day on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. I’m even starting to use YouTube (which is a whole other post).
Now when I Google “Deborah Richmond” or “Tekkbuzz”, I see ELEVEN PAGES of search results that directly relate to my business and myself. What are the results showing? They are showing links to pages of my website, links to specific blog posts I’ve written, to my social media profiles, to guest posts I’ve written for other blogs. The road race results now appear on pages 6 or 7, which is too bad because my results were good!
This is a clear indication that social media is working to make me more visible to search engines. Now a searcher will find all kinds of information about me and my business. They will have a very good sense of what I am all about. And luckily, there are no questionable photos of me and an Elvis impersonator anywhere in the results.
Here are some key ways that using social media helps your search engine optimization:
1) Getting quality, relevant inbound links
A successful social media marketing campaign can result in thousands of new inbound links to your site. Inbound links are one of the most important things that influence the rankings of your site. Put two and two together, and it’s easy to see how social media can be a great way to improve your rankings.
The best thing about this is that the majority (if not all) of the links that come from a social media marketing campaign are natural links; they’re not reciprocated, bought, or solicited.
2) Fresh content = more hooks in the water for search
The more content you have on your site, the more traffic you will snag from search engines. Also fresh content keeps your site updated, which gives users a reason to come back. People don’t want to visit static sites, we’re already too used to sites being social.
3) The engines like frequently updated sites
Feed those indexes with fresh content and get rewarded with frequent visits by the search spiders. Search engines love fresh new content. They will see new content in your Facebook stream, LinkedIn profile, Twitter updates and blog posts. And they will direct traffic to all of those places for you.
When you Google your business name, are you seeing the results you want? Leave me a comment.
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Site visitors 1230
Facebook Friends 105
Twitter Followers 977
LinkedIn Connections 177
Email List Members 207
Inbound Links 819
I’m pleased that my site received a few more visitors than last month. My traffic efforts certainly seem to be consistent, bringing me roughly the same amount of traffic each month. In the next few weeks, I will be implementing a new strategy to, hopefully, grow that traffic.
Twitter is growing again. I made a change this month. I set my account to automatically follow people who follow me. I knew it would increase my followers a little because some people unfollow if you don’t follow them back. I now see how many people that really is because those people are now staying with me, and my number of followers did grow. I haven’t done anything else to grow my followers this month.
Inbound links continues to baffle me. I don’t know why this is growing so rapidly. But I’ll take it!
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Announcing the Social Marketing Machine Podcast! If you are looking for more information on how you can use social marketing to build your business, then you’ll want to check out this podcast. I will be releasing a new one every month. Each episode will be packed with good useful information on building our own social marketing machine. Just click the Play button below.
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Continuing our list of ways to enhance your social media marketing effortst, here are a couple more items:
4. See to it that you are not only communicating, you are also contributing. Your contribution to a conversation will be appreciated by many, most especially by your target market. When you show interest, people will begin to get more interested with you.
5. Creativity captures your audience’s attention. Present your ideas or announcements in a way that it does not sound like you are pushing your company too hard on your target market. Remember that hard selling is not recommended in social media sites as this would result to a decline in your number of followers or friends. Always do your marketing in the most subtle way possible.
While there are a lot of social networking platforms, there are also quite a number of ways to making sure that your accounts in these social networking sites are actually serving their purpose for you and your business. With a little more reading and hands-on exposure, you are on your way to mastering the art of marketing through social media.
Do you think you are maximizing the influence of social media to your target market?
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I love it when readers contact me with social media questions. It allows me to share some of the things I’ve learned using social media. And I can show you how to avoid the mistakes I’ve made.
