PubCon Austin 2011 Takeaways

Social Media Marketing

Twitter

The introduction of advertising on Twitter has been one of the more transparent transitions amongst the social media networks. While networks such as Facebook have inundated their users with updates and advertisements, advertisements on Twitter have been much less invasive. Users now have 3 options for advertising on Twitter which include:

1. Promoted Tweets – ordinary Tweets that advertisers pay to highlight to a wider group of users. Promoted Tweets from advertising partners are called out at the top of some Twitter search results pages. Promoted Tweets are clearly labeled as “Promoted” when an advertiser is paying, but in every other respect they exist initially as regular Tweets and are organically sent to the timelines of their followers. They also retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting. Promoted Tweets are displayed in search in Twitter. If users click on a Tweet that includes a hashtag that is being promoted by an advertiser, they may see a Promoted Tweet among the related Tweets in the details pane. Promoted tweets will also display in related searches in Search Engines. These can be extremely effective for targeting explicit audiences and topics.

1. Promoted Trends are a new advertising concept that began testing in June as an extension of the Promoted Tweets platform. With Promoted Trends, users see time-, context-, and event-sensitive trends promoted by our advertising partners. These paid Promoted Trends appear at the top of the Trending Topics list on Twitter and are clearly marked as “Promoted.” The only real difference from a regular trending topic is that a Promoted Trend is marked as being promoted. Like all other Trending Topics, Promoted Trends are already popular subjects on Twitter, but may not have made their way into the Trending Topics list yet. If a topic doesn’t already meet a minimum level of popularity on Twitter, it can’t be a Promoted Trend.
2. Promoted Accounts are part of “Suggestions for You,” which suggests accounts that people don’t currently follow and may find interesting. Promoted Accounts helps introduce an wider variety of accounts people may enjoy. As with Promoted Trends and Promoted Tweets, this suggestion is labeled as ‘Promoted’ to distinguish it from other recommended accounts. Promoted Accounts are suggested based on a user’s public list of whom they follow. When an advertiser promotes an account, Twitter’s algorithm looks at that account’s followers and determines other accounts that those users tend to follow. If a user follows some of those accounts, but not the advertiser’s account, then Twitter may recommend the advertiser’s Promoted Account to that user. One of the drawbacks of promoted accounts is that they are generally not very targeted and can overlap into other popular topics and end up giving you followers who are not genuinely interested in your products or discussions.

Although Twitter advertising has been well accepted in the social network’s community, advertising should in no way be considered a silver bullet. Advertising alone will not be an effective marketing tool in Twitter. Companies still need to pay considerable attention to activity and monitor @ replies and retweets to ensure Twitter users know that they are “alive”.

Advertisers should also be sure to tailor their ads. Users rely on Twitter for quick information and finding a variety of input on any given topic. Companies need to analyze the important facets of their business to users to create effective promotions.

The challenge for businesses in Twitter advertising is to avoid throwing money at it rather than carving out a stakehold in the community. Thinking that ROI is going to good by simply buying your way to the top will not be effective. Twitter is very communication driven and users tend to appreciate companies that put in the time and effort to provide good information and interaction with followers will be much more respected and thus much more profitable.

Lastly, Tweets count as links and authoritative users are given more credit for links. So become a Twitter authority if you want link building power.

Facebook

Facebook has become one of the largest markets for businesses worldwide and there seems to be a general consensus that you either love it or you hate it. Those who hate it are the companies that have had little or no success doing business on the social network. The main reason that many FB campaigns fail is because they are created hastily and poorly and are not created with a plan to monetize. Some steps to take that will help prevent this problem:

• Make use of newsletters, webinars, and contests on your FB page. Any type of activity or event you can create that provokes user involvement will keep users on your page and make them more apt to purchasing.
• E-commerce stores like SortPrice provide users a direct store on the company FB page. This allows users to shop the products rather than having to follow links to the website in order to view more products.
• Send gift cards to users through FB. The more benefits users see on a FB page the more they will spread through word of mouth and return to the site.
• FB now has applications that essentially use the technology of Groupon. Certain coupons or sales can be offered with a threshold for the sale to take place.

Today, 30% of traffic on sites is socially referred. It is important to the success of business to initiate effective FB campaigns to keep up with competition and convert sales.

Many companies outsource their Social Media, which can be very effective but should be done with caution. There is more to it than simply handing over your account username and password to a SM guru and sitting back with your feet up as the money rolls in. The owner should have involvement in the social networks. They will need to minimally log in and respond to questions and inquiries that a social media expert is not qualified or able to answer. Your SM expert should also be integrated into your company, brief them on the essentials of the business so they understand it and can interact appropriately with your social circle. Databases of pre-approved content for your SM expert to post is also a good idea as they can be provided with weeks’ worth of material to send out without having to constantly ask your permission or ask for new material. Also, promotions, coupons, updates etc. should be sent out in bulk. Very rarely does one message get read by the majority of your fans or followers. It is likely that to reach most of your followers you will need to send out information 3-4 times through a variety of avenues like direct messaging, status updates and @ mentions.

It is worth noting that 92% of fans of any given page never return to the actual page. So, unless you are sending updates and material out to your followers and fans, most of them will never see anything on your page. Advertising to friends of fans is a great way to get new followers and keep the fan page a “social community” as users will see that their friends are fans of the page and be motivated to join as well.

Fan interaction is also vital to FB pages. Don’t be afraid to ask people to participate and throw out some general questions. A good example just to get some interaction would be on a Friday posting a question asking what people are doing with their weekend. Remember that nearly everyone goes to FB for their own entertainment, so selling your business under the guise of entertainment is key to growth and success. Pushing product on FB simply put does not work. You must be subtle and persuade people to want your products rather than tell them to.

Photos are also a great tool for getting people to interact with your site. Scrolling through photos is one of the most popular activities on FB so it should come as no surprise that they will get you traffic. What kind of photos? Well, if you can finagle a way to relate it to your business, pictures of girls are the most viewed photos on FB. Guys like to look at girls, girls like to look at girls – it may sound a bit odd but for traffic’s sake it works.

Copywriting

Content is a great way to drive traffic to your site. There are tons of sites where you can submit articles and content and provide backlinks to your site. Not only do you get visits from people visiting reading your article but you also get the added organic benefit of link building. Unfortunately, after the infamous Panda Update by Google many of these content and link farms have lost much of their swagger. The solution is creating blogs of your own and updating content frequently on your own site.

Fatal mistakes of businesses make with their content

1. Targeting wrong audience. Things you’ll want to ask yourself BEFORE you start.

• What are the demographics of your audience?
• What problem/need do they have?
• Where are they in their buying cycle?
• What kind of hooks/prompts do they respond to?

Again, if you don’t know the answer to these questions, do some research and figure it out. Targeting the right keyword to the right person                will have the biggest impact on conversions. And that takes knowing who they are.

1. If you’re targeting the wrong keywords, it doesn’t matter how well you’re targeting them, you’re still bringing people to your site who won’t convert. Check your conversions rate and find out if the people coming to your page are actually finding what they want. If not, it’s time to make some changes.
2. Ignoring Meta Description. The meta description the second most important tag next to the title tag. It appears right beneath the title in the SERP’s and needs to be as descriptive and accurate as possible for the user to click it.
3. Often business owners switch CMS without giving it much thought and they do that to their detriment. The result of switching to the wrong CMS can be huge duplicate content issues thanks to new page extensions, SEO suicide when you find you can’t customize elements (like the URL structure, for example), and a need for medication when you have to 301 all of your URLs by hand.

Distribution through FB can also be a great avenue for getting content out. Post it on your wall and let your fans know about it. When doing               this follow the 4 A’s approach.

• Authenticity – make sure your content is unique and genuine. Don’t take content from another site and post it to your own FB page trying to pawn it off as your own.
• Attention – make the content interesting. As discussed before, FB is primarily used as entertainment, a distraction from the work day for most people. So make the content interesting. When you’re on lunch break do you feel like reading about a products for cleaning your chimney? Probably not, but maybe you can find an interesting story about something related and subtly place your product promotions within it.
• Authority – plain and simple, make it sound like you know what you’re talking about. If people don’t believe what you say, they’re not going to read it.
• Action – drive your visitors to an action without telling them to do it. You want to funnel them toward the goal rather than throw it in their face.

Advanced SEO

Large scale websites no longer can have the luxury of being optimized page by page. The process is much too time consuming for the benefit it provides. Large scale optimization techniques are the way of the future.

Currently, the number 1 SEO factor is considered to be the site load time. A site that has a site load threshold greater than 4 seconds has little chance of being the top rankings. Some ways to ensure your load time is faster:

• Leverage browser caching to once a month
• Minify CSS and .js files. This is essentially defragging the files so they are all in one place rather than the server having to find all of them all over the place and load them.
• Image SPRITE to defrag images and use CDN for image content. An image SPRITE is a collection of images put into a single image. A web page with many images can take a long time to load and generates multiple server requests. Using image sprites will reduce the number of server requests and save bandwidth.
• If you have a wordpress site install W3 Total Cache.
• Use Google Page Speed Tool to find where your load time is getting held up
• Use The Cloud – a group of servers to scale your platform

Log Files

These are the glue of your website. Analyze your site performance through a few steps:

• Get a bot list of search engines and use the Fantomaster Spider Spy
• Download Log Files
• Onsite SEO match bots to visits to unveil the activity of your visitors
• Find broken links to your site by running test to find 404 errors

Link Building

Exercise this next sentence with extreme caution. Buying links works. Yes this works but you better trust the people you are buying them from because it is technically illegal in Google, but if it is done correctly you can make it work. I don’t recommend doing it, but it is feasible. If Google suspects a site of buying links they will look at who the webmaster is and make a subjective decision. If you have been caught before buying links they probably are not going to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Here are a few better ways to do link building:

• Writing and dispersing content
• Social medias
• Exploratory link building
• Deep linking – embed links within content and request top sites to place it on their pages
• Directories
• Guest posting

PPC Advertising

These are few ways that you improve your PPC campaigns to increase traffic and get more targeted visitors. Use your broad match to find more specific keywords and phrases.

Common mistakes:

• When setting up ppc campaigns manually setup each step rather than using default settings. This will customize your ad to make it function better
• Separate your search/network displays
• Separate mobile/desktop changes
• Make sure your landing pages are accurate and directed a page the ad says
• Use keyword mining
• Analyze your search query reports
• Increase your quality score. No seems to fully understand what all goes into the Quality Score of a ppc ad but more targeted ads and higher CTR seem to be 2 of the major factors.