Praveen: SEO, SEM, Online Marketing

Social Media optimization is technique which can be called as natural optimization on social networks. Promotion no social media channels does not happen often.

Traffic from Social media optimization can be tracked 

1. Google Analytics Referral Traffic

2. Number of Friends who have added you in their friends list in each of your profile in each Social Networks.

3. Frequency of updates and quality of content posted.

4. Number of votes on your content and number of people who regularly vote on your content.

5. The Amount of content in each of your profile pages and community knowledge sharing page.

6. The Total Number of Links to and from these profile pages.

7. Number of comments and frequency. How many of them are not in your friends list.

The amount of effort that is needed to market on social networks is tracked

A Facebook or an Orkut application is like an small widget which is used by the Users of social network. Since this application interacts with lot of people, it also has the ability to interact with the external server. Google Analytics for applications can be embedded into the application giving all data w.r.t the users using the application. Developers will also get an idea about the extent to which the application was spammed by users.

Developer Analytics (http://www.developeranalytics.com/analytics.php) and http://adonomics.com/ are service which is offered to developers of application to keep in touch with the traffic, demographic data, visitor data and conversion data.

These analytical tools in combination with customized tracking which you can set at application level which can send data to external server allows developers to track a lot of information about the user profiles and get useful information such as Traffic, Demographic Data, Profile Data etc.

This data has to be used to remodel and remake applications on Social Networks to make it more useful for users and make it more spam proof. A successful application can be built overtime by building more features to app based on the data, response derived from it.

Google gives details about creating a App;

http://www.google.com/webmasters/gadgets/about/developer.html 

 There are 3 phases for Gadget promotion:

Create: Develop a gadget based on idea. Hire a developer for this or try out yourself. Thinking of an successful idea is Gold, however it happens by chance. Make sure it works on all kind of sites and all Browsers including remote ones like Safari.

Promote: This is the easiest and lest effort part, just add these in various webpages, sites.  Give options to Add to iGoogle, My Yahoo etc.

Track and Optimize: This requires analytics and time. You must use Log file analysis tracking for analyzing the performance of visitor data, traffic data, demographic data, user quality data. Etc. For example your gadget is running on Orkut and Facebook. The number of users in facebook may be more than Orkut, but traffic from Facebook may not be of much use to your business. Then you must customize you App to favour more Orkut community users based on quality of profiles on Orkut. A popular web app can have an impact on Reputation Management and Brand on social networks apart from monetizable traffic.

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How to get traffic from Social Media sites

Remember yourself in school, in school, there are various sections/classes for the same batch and each section/class had set of students. Now think of how popular you were among your entire batch students. How many of them knew your name, how many of them were your friends.

Now the question is suppose you join a school today, how long do you think it takes to become popular among your batchmates. What would you do to become popular among batchmates?

If you have answers to these questions, you have answers to promotion on social media network site.

Almost all businesses are looking to promote their business online. All of them are looking to tap the potential of traffic present on the social media sites. However most of them do not have clear strategy or method to proceed.

This method of marketing on social networks is essentially a form of Direct Marketing. I have participated in social networks and would like to share my experience on starting a community on a social networks and media sites. It requires 100% involvement & participation for making it successful just as you would need to start a new business. There is very thin line of difference between communicating to a community and communicating to a single user. You should be clear of what your site has to offer to the audience. Why should people join your community?

Once your community is built to a stage where it can sustain by itself. It requires minimum participation from your end and will reap maximum benefits. However in initial stages it requires all your time, effort, dedication and careful reputation management.

Social Networks & media sites are best place for reputation management and image building activity for big companies.

There are various smart ways to attract audience to join your community. Link Baiting is very hot topic among webmasters, SEOs, link builders.

If you are good at link baiting then you should know want content to be distributed to attract audience.

• Use various content formats such as Videos, Images, Content for keep your community happy

• You can organize contests, puzzles, quizes for engaging the users.

• Understand & know your community group members, their preferences, geo location, profession, Interests.

• Mostly the mode of communication is Email, Scrap book(Message Boards) or Chat.

• Two main areas of management: Managing Content, Managing Users

• Advertise you community on Blogs, Social Media sites and even on PPC program works good. Nobody has tried advertising
  
  References:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/10/21/community.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/holy-mother-of-linkbait

http://www.fullcirc.com/community/communitytypes.htm

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Social Media Optimization and Social Media marketing is a phrase used to increase the popularity of your website on various social media sites such as Digg, Flickr, Facebook, The Objective for SMO can be very different such as:

1) Brand Building: You want your website to be popular among Social media users, The idea is there is lot of people using Social networks, Social Media sites. How do you become popular among the users?

2) Reputation Management: To attain leadership in industry. You participate in forums, answers program to build an image of your company.

3) Networking with people in the same industry or related industry again for brand building and reputation management.

4) Building Backlinks and Traffic: Social media optimization’s biggest benefit is backlinks and traffic. Traffic directly from social media sites and traffic search engines due to backlinks from social media sites.

Advantages:

1) Ability to target your Market segment

2) No Media costs

Method:

It is form of viral marketing technique, 3 Success Elements in SMO: Linkability, Visibility/Discoverability, Popularity

It is 50% what you do and 50% what your users do. What your users do will depend on how you build your relationship with your users. For example: By providing an easy access to submit your content on social media sites there is good chance your users will post it, if your content is worthy.Therefore the process of making your website social media complaint is known as social media optimization.

Key features of Social Media Sites:

A) Social Media sites have large number of users, therefore increasing the visibility of your website on these sites will surely have marketing benefits.

B) Social Media sites have lot of information such as user profile data which can be effectively used to rank users, or target a specific set of users for advertising.

C) Social Media sites have high user activity, due which fresh content upload happens at frequent intervals sometimes faster than News & PR sites.

D) Most social media sites has the ability to measure the quality of user generated content/users quantitatively and are transparent to general audience and search engines.

For example Digg gives details on how many diggs on content, who has dug, who has blogged about the content, what are their user profile data. All these details are transparent due to which the quality of the site, quality of users and quality of content can be measured both by users and search engines.Elaborating the points stated by Rohit Bhargava on social media optimization.

· Increase your linkability: Linkability is definitely the first step of optimization wherein users must be able to link to your rich content from other websites/blogs. Every successful website/ online business inherently is aware of this.

· Make tagging and bookmarking easy, submitting content easy: In short this means encourage to people to link to your website or post your content on other sites. As website owner you must encourage your users to link to your content and make the overall process of linking simpler, by few clicks.

· Reward inbound links: When you reward your users by giving a link to them in return of their link, you will encourage them to write more about you. This is very nicely practiced by Google blogs, you can find Google blogs(Adwords blog, Webmaster central blogs etc) linking to every blog who write about them. This encourages blog writers to write more about Google and their latest news.

· Help your content travel: This is another important optimization. If you allow your content travel, you are also generating backlinks wherever your content is published. RSS feeds are great example.

· Encourage the mashup: Mashup is simple algo in which inputs one or more content and outputs a new content using standard functions. Do you know the behavioral pattern of users who visit your website? Find out the behavioral profile of your users:

A) Are they tech savvy?

B) Are they first time internet users?

C) How many of them have a blog?

D) How many of them have Orkut profile, facebook profile?

E) What is their Internet Usage frequency?

F) How many of your website users, have a profile in social media sites?

A website like irctc.co.in may not currently need a social media optimization, but a website like rajshri.com definitely needs one currently. It also depends on how you want to grow as online business and which market segment you want to target in future.

1. Create Valuable and useful content, junk content can never be able to achieve the traffic, rankings you desire. The content must be useful for the users in your market segment, so that your attract quality traffic.

2. Help the social media users to post, rate and review your content.

3. Participate in relevant social media site, and network with people.

Types of Social Media Sites

Various types of social media sites are reviewed on SEO, Traffic, Ease of Optimization: For actively promotion and building your community high participation levels are required in each of the below sites.

1) Bookmarking Sites: Most bookmarking sites are open for crawling; hence getting as many pages in other users bookmark list is beneficial.

2) Social Media Content Rating Sites like Digg, reddit, propeller etc.: The work has to be done in building your network, friends’ circle that diggs your content, only way to attain top rankings is high level of participation in combination with posting high value content.

3) Image Sharing Sites: Upload images, tag effectively, form groups & networks for sharing and tagging.

4) Video Sharing Sites: Sites like Youtube.com, Dailymotion host videos as well allow users to post them on blogs, link to them etc. Additionally there are users viewing your video & posting comments on your video.

5) Social Networks such as Orkut, Facebook etc: Very little SEO value, as most sites are not open for search engine crawlers. Ideal for reputation management.

 

Social Media Optimization cannot be separated with Search Engine Optimization as SEO reaps significant benefits from SMO activities. Moving forward Social Media optimization will be the way to optimize sites, as sites will focus more on personalization, local and building relationship with niche audience.ROI of SMO activities is dependent on what you measure as success. If generating backlinks and ranking on search engines is success for you then you must invest in SMO activities for generating backlinks only.

The question is how do you measure success?

If you have a small website you can measure traffic and backlinks. For this you can set up Google analytics with e-commerce tracking and goal conversions. Look at traffic from referral sites and you can find traffic from social media sites. Also, you can find increase in rankings for top keywords on search engines.For more study on Social Media Optimization you could find these links useful:

• http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/introduction-to-social-media-optimization.html
• http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060829-150053
• http://www.searchenginejournal.com/social-media-optimization-13-rules-of-smo/3734/
• http://www.toprankblog.com/2006/08/new-rules-for-social-media-optimization/
• http://blog.seoptimise.com/2007/02/ultimate-social-media-optimization-list.html
• http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/weblog/2006/08/5_rules_of_soci.html

This Article was originally found on praveenkodur.comCopyright 2008, All rights reserved by praveenkodur.com.

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Every Online Business, large or small has some few consistent sources of Online traffic to their website. Mainly the Direct Traffic, Sponsored Advertising Traffic and Organic Search Engine traffic.

The Long tail for Traffic Sources can be explained as:

A) Numerous Sources each generating smaller amount of targeted traffic.

B) Cumulatively form a significant percentage of overall traffic.

Advantage of Long tail traffic sources

A) Never be completely dependent on few sources of traffic. Never put all eggs in one basket.

B) Mitigate the risk due to competition & market dynamics.

C) Find New segment of target audience.

a. Forums, Social Networks, New Media formats also attract good amount of targeted traffic.
93% of IT professionals in US find social network helpful for professional solutions.

b. 60% of facebook users login daily.

c. It Industry spends more time in Social Media

How to develop a long tail of traffic sources

A) Optimize sites to support all types of users, media formats (Video, Images, Audio).

B) Do not ignore the needs of even a small percentage of users on your site.

C) Include features in your site for every new type of users as well. For example: Video/Audio/Image content users,

Why the effort?

A) People are increasingly using social media sites like del.icio.us, digg, facebook, answers etc.

B) Support your users to use your product on every social site.

B) Competition on newer traffic sources is less, so it is better to make the first move.

C) It is important to increase the length of the long tail.

D) It is also important to increase the width of the long tail.

D) Develop applications to like Blog, gadget, Facebook application, podcast subscription.

Using the Face Book example, which has more than 230% growth even in countries like India:

A) The idea behind making the site Open to developers was to increase the long tail of traffic.

B) Facebook now supports all type of users & all needs of users.

C) Even the need of small percentage of users to share Books is met by a Book application, which notifies people of best books and rates them. Face book car pool application, Face book Linkedin Application

D) Each application on facebook could have been a new profitable online business altogether.

E) Facebook’s is a collection of multiple brilliant ideas put in one single site. This has exploded the website, traffic, activity and popularity & brand value.

F) Every small & medium business can cash in traffic on Facebook by creating an innovative application for users. By giving freedom to external developers it has allowed them to create products for Facebook. These products meet the needs of even the smallest percentage of users on the site.

G) This is the biggest USP of facebook: satisfying the remote need of the smallest percentage of users with products developed by external developers who in turn get their brand promoted.

Overall Facebook wins by ensuring the long tail grows longer and wider.

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A normal website such as an e-commerce site, News & Events site, Travel site or a generic portal like Yahoo, the core of the website is a product/platform that is sold to people. A e-commerce site can act as platform to Buy/Sell/Trade, a Travel portal offers access to bookings, News & events portal provides information material.

In an Online Community or Social Network the focal point of the website/business is the user and user generated content. A social website generates reputation by the quality of users/user’s content present on the site just as a portal gains reputation by the quality of product offered to website users.

The core values for such websites are:
A) The focal point of the website is the user generated content and the user himself.
B) Quality of users/user generated content is the quality of the website
C) Users/Moderators can make or break your website
B) Use Product cleverly as a tool to attract right people to use the site and increase activity.

Types of Social Networks & Online Communities.
A) Forums
B) Groups
C) Book Marking Sites
D) Content Popularity Sites (Digg, etc)
E) Answers
F) Social Networking
G) Professional Networking
H) Specialty Search Engines (video, Photos) Like Youtube, Flickr.com

Traffic to Social Media Sites

A) Organic Traffic

B) Word of Mouth Marketing
i) Blogs
ii) Marketing on Other Social Network Sites (Facebook)
iii)Viral
iv)Link Baiting

C) Targeted PPC advertising (very small scale)

D) Product Offerings: This is basically generating gadgets, applications which can be used in external sites and help drive traffic to your website.

Traffic From Social Media Sites

It is true that you can receive huge amount of targeted traffic for Free from Social Networks, this is possible only if you can spend lot of time and effort in each of the social network.

It is important to build reputation on your profile in these sites to drive targeted traffic.

If your business receives good amount of traffic from other social network sites then you must be aware that traffic flow is not consistent over a period of time. There will be spikes in traffic graph from social network sites.

Social Media Marketing

Social Network is a place where users posts content (textual, video, other) about various topics under predefined categories. There is generally a moderator or an algorithm, which monitors activities and gives prominence to few stories/user generated content. Moderator also starts discussion or edits the thread on any topic.

A) Content is clearly divided into Communities, Categories or Tags

B) Tagging is very essential. Location & Keyword tagging are 2 main important tags

C) All pages to have static urls as the content posted by users can rank in Organic results.

D) The Title, Category Heading, Breadcrum trail, Number of Views of the content, Content Url and links in the content post are essential for organic ranking.

E) If right content is not getting exposure the moderator has to work to ensure they get maximum views. Bring them on Home Page or link from relevant other pages.

F) The features and tools must be designed to get right content on Top of user attention.

G) To know the value of social media site,

i) Find the top number of views for any content or category.
ii) Find the number of users on each category at any point of time
iii) What is the average posts per user on each category
iv) Find the top 20% of the users posting maximum posts/threads. The same goes to rating content as well.

H) Moderator/Algorithm must choose the Content, Urls to be placed in the home page of the site.

I) Sharing the content is very essential, Users should be able to share any content with their friends.

J) Having a Personalized and customizable user profile is very essential.

K) Rating of Users by different level of activity on the site is good feature.

L) User Voting on the content is important aspect of the website.

M) The best content or Top Viewed/Rated Content must be clearly highlighted.

N) Users could be stalked by other users. Send a Add a friend request to other users.

O) All the content on the site to be made available to search engine crawlers.

P) Link back or track back Urls are essential. giving a link to posts which link to this content.

Q) In Q & A, giving rating to answers, users, and choosing a best answer is very essential.

R) Commenting is another most important aspect of the Social network. Giving a comment on every post increases the overall content on that page, helps it rank better in site search as well as organic web search.

S) Sending personal messages to other users is an important feature.

T) The user profile must exist in unique static Url which can be shared, linked from elsewhere on the web.

U) RSS feeds of user generated content is important. Users must be able to subscribe to other user generated content.

V) Including a plugin code which can help embed user generated content into an external blog, website is a useful tool.

W) The website must be able to assess the semantic relevance of the content posted by user and associate a relevant category or a tag to it.

X) The content posted by user should be sent as feed to various other vertical search engines and meta search engines.

Y) Every location or geography must have unique domain and contain local content.

Z) On every content page there must be links to other similar content.

AA) Marking a content as favorite is essential.

AB) Generating Quality Traffic & exposing Quality content. Both are reciprocal, you need to expose quality content to users and search engines and hence attract quality users to site.

AC) Moderator must be experienced and very good in promoting the right content.

AD) Users must be able to Bulk edit and manage the content submitted by them.

AE) License for every content submitted is essential

AF) Giving a number on every element based on its activity is very essential.

i) Number of Views of a content.
ii) Number of Votes to a content or answer.
iii) Number to every user based on his level of activity.
iv) Number of Comments on a content.
v) Number of Friends to each user.
vi) Number of webpages linking to each content.
vii) Number of categories, tags through which you can find this content.
viii) Number of Favorites for this content.

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