How to SEO your social media assets

By now you probably have a number of social media profiles created such as Twitter, Facebook Page, Linkedin profile, SlideShare account, etc. Although these are not located under your domain name, it is important that each one of those profiles is properly optimized to be found on Google. This post is about ways to SEO your social media accounts and overall social presence.

First of all, anything you put out on the web is indexed by Google (unless your profile is part of a private social network that is closed from Google and Bing bots). So, let’s approach it two ways:

1. Optimizing your social media profile for SEO
2. Optimizing your social assets for SEO

SEO for social media profiles

There’s a number of great articles written on the subject of optimizing your social media profiles for better SEO performance in search engines. So, I’ll just reference the good ones here.

• Tips to make your Twitter profile rank by Matt Leonard
• Tips for optimizing your Twitter profile for SEO by David McClellan
• Presentation on SEO for Linkedin Company Page by PJA
• How-to guide and a case study at SEOmoz by apiwarun
• Facebook as an SEO tool at Pubcon by Aaron Kronis:

There’s a lot of other great resources that I recommend you look for. Just Google things like [youtube (or other social profile) profile seo tips] and you should get a lot of cool info on each social media profile you’re interested in.

SEO for social media assets

Again, anything, and I mean anything you put out there will be indexed by search engines like Google (unless it’s a closed social network). So I recommend you pay attention to optimizing any piece of content you are distributing. Some quick examples include:

• Images on your Facebook Page
• PDFs to Scribd
• Power Point presentations on Slideshare
• Submitting articles to StumbleUpon
• and others.

Each one of those resources has meta data that is important for both internal (network’s own search tool) and external search (Google and Bing). Therefore it’s key to ensure your files are properly described for people and search engines. Let’s take one of my latest presentations that I put out on SlideShare.

SlideShare SEO example

I recently ran a course at Higher School of Economics in Perm. It was an internet marketing module for a ContEd marketing group of students. After the lectures I would upload the slides to my SlideShare profile so my students can grab from there.

Within a day after submitting the presentation I got over 100 views. My group was only 15 people. This means that 85 people were able to find my presentation within a day from its release.

Let’s look at what I did to get to these stats within a day from my internet marketing presentation submission.

• Title: The title is of appropriate length, starts with keywords (internet marketing) and is descriptive.
• Description: The overview of the presentation is like a snippet that tells a user what it’s about. I ensured that my other sessions with this marketing group of students had unique descriptions.
• Category: I chose the Technology category because I was talking about internet marketing, so the presentation was relevant to searchers in those specific categories.
• Tags: I tried not to overdo the amount of tags. I used single-word attributes to explain what the presentation covered.
• File downloads: I turned the file downloads on. Although I don’t think it affects SEO directly. But it definitely offers users more options to interact with my presentation.

By the same example I recommend you optimize any asset that goes out through your business profiles on social networks. Feel free to check my earlier post on SEO for PDFs. Ensuring that your docs are found on Google and through internal search is important for increasing the number of leads your materials generate.

Facebook tactics to keep you on the site

Facebook has been updating things recently. Left-hand sidebar was updated with new list management features in response to Google Circles. Right-hand floating sidebar got status updates at the top. The pop bar is now following you as you scroll through the page. Another one of Facebook tactics is reducing the number of email notifications you get.

My first response to the last update was: Great! Facebook is trying to optimize things to reduce clutter in my mailbox. Then, after missing a few messages and important updates I realized that this Facebook tactic mostly benefits Facebook and its advertisers, not the users. Now I have to go to Facebook to check on things more often. This, as a result, increases my time spent on the site. Who benefits again? Advertisers.

Of course, what’s good for me may not be good for you, so you should keep to your Facebook practices. However, I intend to change things back to where they were. As Facebook suggests, I’ll review my notification settings to make sure I get the email notifications.

So what can we learn from this Facebook tactics as marketers? Here’s a few things that come to mind:

Advertising advantage

If your site sells ad space or uses AdSence. your primary goal should be to increase time on site metric. The more time people spend on your site, the more pages they’re likely to click through, the more ads they’ll see (and click on), and the more money you make.

Brand development advantage

It is important to keep users on site for better engagement with your brand. The more time a user spends on your website, the more you can learn about him / her, and the more opportunities you get to connect with your audience.

SEO advantage

Google uses your website metrics as a factor to rank your pages. Things like bounce rate, click through rate, and time on site matter when it comes to SEO rankings of your pages. So, it’s important to increase time on site for SEO purposes too.

Now that we’ve had this discussion of importance of “time on site” metric, I’ll be putting together a post on specific tactics you can use to get that metric higher. Is there anything else we can learn from Facebook tactics? Let’s discuss in the comments!

Can I help you improve your conversion rates?

Why you should optimize your website for Bing

Most of my organic search engine traffic comes from Google (95%). 5% of organic traffic comes from Bing. One one hand, I should totally forget about optimizing my website for Bing search engine. One the other hand, there’s one fat reason I should pay attention to Bing SEO factors: Facebook uses Bing search results. And as you probably know, a few people use Facebook.

The logic is very basic – people search things on Facebook. Sometimes they find what they’re looking for among Facebook pages, groups, etc. But if they don’t, users turn to Web Search results. And guess what? These are powered by Bing. Here’s a nice article that goes into a few things to keep in mind while optimizing for Bing.

UPDATE: here’s what Bing has to to say about key optimization tactics.

Question? LMK in comments!

Socializing the corporation, event in review

I want to share what I learned at an event that was organized by Bruce Jensen through Calgary Web Communications Strategy Group on meetup.com. The key difference of this event was that attendees were either from communications departments inside major companies or from associations within energy sector in Calgary. The only person I knew was Doug Lacombe, who MC’d the event and did an amazing job.

The event was a mix of a panel discussion and short presentations by social media practitioners. Presenters shared their experiences of managing social media for both small and large companies. The three featured companies were: More than Mangos by Belinda de Wolde, TVI Pacific by Rhonda Bennetto and Encana by Belinda de Wolde. Here are my takeaways from this event. I hope it’ll help you see how different companies deal with social media.

Social media lessons

• Simplify the way your customers connect with your brand. Connect, connect, connect. Create a separate page on the website: Connect with Us. For example, TVI Pacific page features three different ways to connect with the company.
• Social media can fix the trust issue. Transparency is the key, social media can help gain trust through making your company transparent. Engaging into conversations with your customers can help energy sector companies to regain trust.
• Always consider your audience. Explaining social technology in human terms helps a lot. Speak in the language of your audience. Blogging, tweetting and socializing on the web should be done considering the age and background of the audience you’re talking to.
• Engage with your audience through conversations. Create a discussion board on Facebook page. Moderation is, of course, one of the biggest challenges but having a please where people can share opinions and ask questions about your company is extremely useful. TVI Pacific’s practical application: every time a press release is issued, a new Facebook discussion topic is created, and Page Fans are invited to discuss the matter.
• Social media helps general awareness. Social media is not about a new opportunity to broadcast, but a new way to engage with your clients, vendors, partners, investors. Engagement with various parties is the key in distributing information through social media. Encana’s practical application: Encana’s helps community organizations. These organizations help Encana by linking back and talking about it in the social space.
• Ensure consistent messaging. Regardless of how many social media properties / network profiles you have, make sure the information is consistent across all of them. Ensure the information is consistent between traditional and digital space too. Create ways for your customers to connect with your company through press releases and other traditional marketing channels.
• It’s worth hiring an expert. To train you or even take part in expanding your social media presence. For example, hash-tagging of messages on Twitter helps syndicate the messages through the web. This is not obvious when you first start with social media, but an expert, Doug Lacombe in this case, helped Rhonda a lot.
• Blogs are not always necessary. If you don’t plan to update it at least weekly, don’t start it.
• Be a champion inside your organization. Teach everyone inside your company by doing it and showing results. Dealing with social media you always have to be prepared for controversy and criticism from both inside and outside of your organization.
• Experiment. Test. Flirt. Track. Measure. And be consistent. Have been at observing, flirting stage of social media engagement. Haven’t we all?

Thanks again to organizers and participants! Were you there too? Feel free to contribute in the comments section.