Lately the internet has become a maze of sites wanting your profile and contact information. Where it used to cost money to advertise or get a link from other websites, now they seem to be begging for your personal or business details. The good thing is that a business can eventually be found in dozens of ways on the internet. The bad part is that you are probably going to have all this information sold and re-sold, and email spam is only going to get worse. Our first bit of advice is to go to Google's Gmail or Yahoo, and get yourself an extra email to use on all these profiles. You want something that you can check every day...even 2-3 times a day. But you also want an email that handles spam easily and in volume.
Why Bother With Social Media Marketing?
As the question used to be "Why have a website?" now you wonder why it's important to participate in social media marketing. The answer? Because you can't afford not to! The amount of people using Facebook and Twitter is so large that they are rumored to be giving Google a run for the money. If you are selling goods or services, you have to participate in this new media, or your competitors will run circles around you. Do you want to rank in the search engines? If you don't have a blog or do any of these things, you are going to find it very hard to do.
How to Do a Business Blog
More than any other type of social media, a business blog will be your most important way to communicate with your customers and promote your website in the search engines. From an advertising point of view, a well-written business blog will show a prospective customer that you are experienced and knowledgable in your field. From an SEO standpoint, the fresh content you provide, along with internal linking from your articles, will do more to boost your site in the search engines than anything else you may do.
Having a blog that is a part of your website is important for internal links, and having other outside blogs or doing a guest post on someone else's blog will bring you much needed external links to your site. Ideally, you should have, and write in in one of each kind. We can set up a blog for you, write articles, and train you to use it yourself in the most beneficial way.
Some examples of our client blogs are:
Carolina Insurance Blog
Albuquerque Real Estate Blog
Greenville SC Real Estate Blog
Local Business Listings
Having your business listed on Google Maps/Places can actually be more effective than regular search rankings! When is that? It's when you are in the Local Business Results box that appears with many search phrases.
When you search for "plumbers Myrtle Beach, SC" in Google, this is what you see:
Note the businesses listed in the "Local" results at the top. These are businesses that have Google Local or Map pages. If you don't have one, you won't be on there. Getting in those top 7 results is not a certain science...but if you fill your page out in extra detail, include the right keywords, include photos, and GET REVIEWS from other people, you shuold be able to be there. Chances are, customers searching for your type of services will not look past those local results. So you can see how important it is to get your business listed on Google Maps! Here's our
Myrtle Beach Web Design listing.
Yahoo has almost the exact same setup, called Yahoo Local. You'll find us listed here as for Web Design. Bing has a similar business listing section, here as Myrtle Beach Web Design again.
Other important pages to create a profile on are:
• Superpages.com
•
YellowPages.com
• Insider Pages.com
• Merchant circle.com
• Manta.com
There is one drawback we should mention about local business pages. If your business is in a small town outside of a larger one, you may only show in local results that mention the city for your address. If this happens, the only way to fix it is to get an office address in the larger city. Although Google is trying to help with this by letting you input the "area served" information, if there are other businesses in the big city that are your competition, and they have a local page, you may want to consider this.
Reviews and Testimonials
All of these business profiles are going to require you to have reviews from satisfied customers before you're going to show in their top results. Gather your friends, call your customers, and make up your mind to get this done. If not, you've wasted your time building the profiles. Google and Yahoo are actually showing the reviews from the above sites on your Local pages along with the ones you do with Google and Yahoo. So Git er Done!
Now this brings us to the true "Social Media" sites such as Facebook, Google's Buzz, Twitter, Digg, and a hundred others.
Social Profile Pages
You can spend the next 3 months getting your profile on every new social site that's popping up. Every entrepreneur in the world is hoping they will create the next "Facebook Phenomenon". The truth is, only a handful of them are important right now.
You MUST deal with Facebook... First you have to have a personal profile. Even if you don't spend a lot of time on it, fill it out, upload some family photos, tell the world who you are, and find your friends. And you will find them there, too. One of the easiest ways is to look up your high school and join that group. You'll find a hundred "friends" that you went to school with. In fact, you may very well find you are spending time on Facebook because you ENJOY it. It's one of the very best ways to keep in touch with long distance relatives and friends. Facebook is improving every day, and they deserve the incredible popularity they have obtained.
Once you've done your personal page, you'll see there are Facebook Business Pages as well. When you find one, scroll to the bottom of the page and look on the left hand side. You'll see a link that reads
"Create My Own Business Page". Click on that, and you'll then be walked through doing one. You can set your blog to automatically post on it. You can add links to your website (although they are "no-followed") and best of all, when you want to communicate with your customers, you'll have an easy way to do it. Just don't forget to (sigh) ADVERTISE your business page so that your regular customers will find it!
Next is Twitter. Again, this seems to be a must do. I myself find it the biggest waste of time on the earth, but it's incredibly popular. If you aren't that interested in it, create your page and set your blogs, YouTube, and other things to post to it. Then, other than being constantly bombarded with other Twitter users wanting to "follow" you, there's nothing else to do. Or maybe you'll find you like using Twitter! If you enjoy posting all your thoughts and actions throughout the day in short, limited blurts, Twitter is your tool!
Other sites that fill different niches are the bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Yelp, Delicious, and Technorati. There are many others, but these are the ones that the search engines seem to favor. There's no question that using these sites with your blogs helps with SEO. And there's no question that there is a way to do it correctly. You really need to find someone like us to train you. Otherwise, read some of the tutorials on the internet and try to stumble through it all. One important site called FriendFeed can also tie all your site feeds together and save you some time, too.
Google, Yahoo, Ask, and a few other search engines have bookmarking pages as well. For SEO purposes, we advise you to use them too. When you do a blog post, submit it to all the bookmarking sites and you'll soon have a well-ranked blog that will really help you promote your website!
A few other types of social sites that are worth mentioning...YouTube - which in itself is a great SEO tool that we can't go into here. The photo storage sites like Google's Picasa, Yahoo's Flickr, MSN's Webshots, and PhotoBucket have profile pages and help you by putting your photos into the search engines. MySpace is still important, particularly for the music industry and celebrities. Facebook has practically made them obsolete for others, but it serves a need. Google's new BUZZ is their attempt to build a cross between Facebook and Twitter, and shows promise. My advice? Always use a Google tool. It stands to reason they are going to favor the sites that do!
If you are overwhelmed, nobody can blame you. This is why you need to hire an SEO firm like us to explain it all or do it for you!
