We all work in a business dominated by people with infomercial expectations of zero effort and immediate results. They are all looking for that quick fix. They salivate at the thought of finding those magic search terms. They dream of finding the greatest automated social marketing system that will instantly produce hordes of highly targeted conversion ready traffic. Don’t believe me? There are 277,000,000 search engine responses on Google when searching using the term free twitter apps.
It is time to stop running your dealership on the lottery ticket business model, and it is time to begin social media marketing that will provide you persistent long term traffic to your site.
Catalog Business Model
Many entertainment businesses operate using a catalog business model. The Beatles continue to make tens of millions each year based on their catalog of music and music publishing rights. In 2004 the MGM studio was sold to Sony for $4.85 billion despite not having a hit TV show or movie for more than a decade. Why did MGM command such a high price without a viable franchise or recent hit? It was based on the 5,000 movies they had in their catalog. The core essence of the catalog business model is that each individual title may not produce much revenue, but the combined revenue from of all of the small titles is a big number.
Does the catalog business model sound familiar? It should, as it is the essence of long tail search theory and nowhere is it more powerful than in social media marketing.
The Long Tail
The long tail search phenomenon defines how a collection of low frequency keyword phrases can accumulate into a larger number than the top 20 search terms combined. Said differently a catalog of unique content is potentially more powerful than a handful of high ranking pages.
Social media marketing is all about regular communication via sites and technologies such as Twitter, Facebook and Blogs. A person with an infomercial mindset and approach to business will expect immediate and overwhelming success from their first blog post or tweet. They might continue on for a week or so, but they will quickly give up because they didn’t see an immediate 4x increase in their inbound traffic.
The hidden power of social media marketing comes with the volume accumulated over time. Having a video of Torrance Toyota is nice, but it goes beyond that. It isn’t about a single tweet. It isn’t about a single Facebook update. The power comes from the myriad of terms that will naturally be generated by just writing on a regular basis.
Dominance isn’t achieved with copy and paste
Some dealers may succumb to the ease of constantly posting inventory updates and specials. How is the content different from post to post? If you were Google would you save 2,000 copies of the same content? I know I wouldn’t, so there really isn’t any persistent value of that approach to social media marketing. If you tweet the same basic content 2,000 times, Google will distill those 2,000 entries to one basic search response. I may be crazy but 2,000 tweets to get one search listing on Google sounds like a lot of work to me.
There are Boston Toyota dealers who clearly get social media, and Woburn Toyota is a great example of one. They understand the inherent long term search power in the differentiation of content. They integrate local content and current events in with their dealership related content. The mix provides a long term strategy for comprehensive search coverage.
The Long Tail of Social Media
If it is your stated objective to dominate the search engines, you won’t achieve your goal by posting virtually the same content over and over. Mix it up and be unique. Don’t be afraid of seasonal content as it will bloom and produce fruit on a yearly basis. Our lives exist within cycles that repeat each year, so write content on how to prepare your vehicle for winter or summer. Write evergreen content that is useful year round on topics such as navigation systems and Bluetooth connectivity. Most importantly write about what interests you, and the collection or catalog of content your produce will yield you powerful long term consistent traffic.
Remember they call it surfing because the visitor didn’t initially intend to go to your site. They were out navigating the web searching for something else, but your low frequency keyword phrase caught their eye. It was the power of long tail social media in action.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
This is an excellent post. Long-term strategy is critical for success. For example, if one spends time to understand powerful search tools like TipTop http://FeelTipTop.com, one stands to gain a lot in the medium to long terms.
Content marketing isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon, said Drew McLellan. SEO copywriting is a just a skill which is included into a global Social Media strategy.
The image chosen for this article has no connection with the content. I’m very displeased with it’s inclusion here. It’s selection reflects poorly on the author both intellectually and socially.
I am very active on social media and I get lots of traffic from it but it’s hard to keep the visitors coming when you have no news for them. My organic searc visitor are very few thus far and I am really working on inceasing this by using slightly different post titles – we shall see if it works.
PS. what was wrong with the image??
Excellent post, I agree with it 100%. I love the long tail analysis and brings to mind the success of Amazon using long tail.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/10/rankspeeds-sentiment-search-engine-tracks-blogs-and-twitter/