Long Tail Search Comes To Life in Social Media Marketing

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.

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Social Media Strategy: Hire, Outsource, or DIY?

Social media has officially become a business. Many in the industry would argue that it’s been a business for years, but until recently it has been very hush-hush and hidden in the shadows.  If you were to count the number of people claiming to be social media gurus, experts, marketers, or strategists a year ago, it would have probably been in the hundreds.

Today, it’s in the tens of thousands. Scanning Twitter and Facebook alone is evidence of this, and they are only a small part of a true strategy.

As huge corporations, home-office startups, and everyone in between rushes to get into social media, the first question that they must ask themselves is, “Do I do it myself, hire someone to do it at the office, or outsource it to a social media marketing firm?”

It’s a good, simple question. The answer is far from simple.

Social Media

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Social Media Marketing: Different Styles, Different Goals

Social Media MarketingRegardless of where a business stands, chances are that if the Internet has anything to do with its success, there is a place for social media marketing in the business plan.  New companies, old companies, big companies, small companies — they could all use social media marketing to some extent.  Whether they sell online or even if they don’t sell anything at all, Web 2.0 is a place that can help to make or break a company.

The real questions is this: “What is social media marketing and why do I need it?”

There are several different manifestations that can be considered social media marketing.  Knowing which one is good for your company makes all the difference in the world in determining how to integrate it into a business plan. [Read more...]

Going Social for Marketing, Business, and Fun

porkfriedsocial.comSocial Media Marketing isn’t new. 2008 is simply the year that it emerges as THE thing to do if you want your business, charity, or blog to be “in” instead of “out”.

With companies that aren’t traditionally forward thinking in their marketing techniques, such as Ford Motor Company and Starbucks, making a push to enter social media marketing, it is clear that both big and small business are starting to take notice. Even local businesses are approaching anyone knowledgeable they can find on the subject to help them.

Below are some of the social media initiatives and trends from 2007 that tell of things to come in 2008. First, there are ways to create a web presence that goes beyond building a website or a blog. Then there are ways to drive traffic through social media to these websites. [Read more...]

SEO Spammers: Leave Social Media Sites Alone!

Spam 2.0You’ve seen them before.  They create accounts that have either a gibberish name or “SEOSuperstud”.  No avatar, or one that is their company logo.  They might have lots of people befriended.  They may have none.

They always submit.  They never vote/Digg/upmod anyone else’s submissions.  Their submissions get 1 or fewer votes (unless they are a MASS – a Multi-Account-SEO-Spammer, in which case they will have more than one, but it will always be the same amount and always voted by the same “people”).

They submit stories or websites that nobody from social media visits or votes for, and they don’t care.  They are the social media SEO Spammers.  If nobody clicks on their link, no worries.  The only visit they care about is from Googlebots, and sadly (in some cases) Google will visit and take note of the website.

We wanted to make a video spoof on the “Leave Britney Alone” theme, but neither Chris Crocker nor Seth Green were available.  Instead, we’ll just put together a nice little rant about why Reddit, Propeller, Newsvine, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Sphinn, Digg, and the others are not communities tolerant of spammers.  More importantly, we’ll offer ways to combat the issue.  Read on. [Read more...]

Social Media: Experts Offer Tips for Success

There are always articles about getting started in or getting better at social media, but this week was flooded with some great ones written by talented, respected authors.  Here, I have compiled some great resources, some “must reads” for anyone wanting a leg up.

Social media is huge and growing.  Those who have had success are often not willing to offer advice.  It was a great week — the advice was strong and it seemed to be free flowing.  Enjoy

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Social Self Sabotage

Ben Cook with bloggingexperiment.com takes a very straight-forward, conversational approach to showing the primary mistakes that submitters of social media make.  Faking comments, misleading titles… we’ve all been tempted to try it.  Some of us (myself included) have had marginal success doing these things.  In the long run, it is futile and hurts your chances of building a strong profile that puts stories on the front pages consistently.

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Social Media Marketing: Death to the Microsite? (mediaweek.com)

The greatest advantage of social media marketing is that you don’t have to bring people to your website to advertise to them. With a growing segment of internet buyers finding what they need where they already are, namely social networks like Facebook, the old goal of pulling people to their advertising microsites is swiftly being replaced by the new goal of pushing advertising to the people.

The “old” model was to create a small website or even a page on a current website that highlighted a product or service.  Information, calls to action, links [Read more...]