Home / social media optimization

Make Your Blog an Interactive Social Media Hub

Bloggers often feel that it is sufficient to provide regular and timely content to their readers. What they often overlook is the need to blend their social media networks into their blogs. While it may be great to have well written content, unless people are finding, reading and sharing it, you might as well be talking to yourself when you blog.

Why Social Media Matters

There have been numerous accounts of how Google’s Panda update impacted blogs, writing sites and even high-powered websites. Many of these sites screamed that their content was original, timely and relevant. However, Google went a step further and rated content based on how much traffic it was able to attract. Today, bloggers who fail to share their content on their social media sites will typically find their traffic staying at the same levels for days, weeks or even months at a time.

Incorporating social media

Bloggers often feel that incorporating their social media activities into their blogs means they are going to have to learn how to do all types of fancy programming and that it has to be time consuming. This is no longer the case since social networking sites have made it easier than ever to link blogs to social media accounts. There are several options available, some depending on the platform that the blog is created on including:

• Plugins – WordPress platforms work best with high-quality plugins. These are generally created by independent programmers and available for a small fee or donation to the developer. These plug-ins vary from those that will allow readers to share content with others to those that will automatically notify social media sites of new posts.

• Badges – Many of the popular social media sites offer users the ability to obtain code directly from the site and insert it into individual blog posts or along side-bars. These badges link the readers directly to the bloggers social media sites. These are especially good for those who maintain fan pages on Facebook, Groups on LinkedIn or have an active Google+ account.

• RSS Feeds – Perhaps one of the most overlooked tools for bloggers is the RSS feed. These feeds allow bloggers to do numerous things including (a) setting up an interactive newsletter, (b) making a “sticky” post of social media feeds or (c) feeding new posts directly to social media accounts.

Today, webmasters must prepare their blog and social media campaigns carefully in order to draw attention to their websites. Whether a business is providing services or products, all of the pieces must be carefully integrated for maximum success. Not too long ago, many business owners felt that having a website to display their products or services was enough. Today, this is not the case as users are growing more demanding and Google as well as other search engines are putting a higher emphasis on the value of social media.

Social Media Optimization…

Hello fellow Internet Marketers,

I thought I would take a minute to stop and let you folks in a little inside secret. That’s right, one that we’ve been keeping to ourselves, and have just recently begun to offer these services to our clients. Most people these days have begun to realize the power of Social Media. It took quite a few years for “SEO” to catch on, and now…has it ever caught on.

The Social Wave arrived a few years back, and our own team has spent a lot of time to master and grow our own presence on Twitter, Facebook & of course Youtube. In the process, we had advertisers that would ask us in passing if we knew of anyone who could help them with Social Media Optimization for 1 platform or another. So we decided that we would begin to service these clients…and we’ve been quite successful.

An couple of examples of our successful uses of Social Networking platforms, to give you an idea of how we used Social Media in our own efforts and then for that of a client in Spain.

For ourselves, we knew that outreach socially beyond SEO was necessary for growing our new brand under the name of AffCon2010. Our objectives were clear, awareness, visibility, engagement and of course adoption of delegates. In doing so, we used a combination of 3 platforms…Twitter, Facebook & YouTube. In Twitter, we were able to seed, track and target our market for the new trade show, along with populating the promo info we were pushing out in Twitter to Facebook. Couple that with a few well placed Video’s in Youtube that went viral and cross posting of those videos to both Twitter & Facebook…and I can tell you it was a resounding success with an amazing turn-out in Colorado this past June.

Now, for those who are interested in Video Optimization, I would highly recommend that you perk your ears up! We received permission to illustrate this to the general public from our client, he is not in our space…but is an independent filmmaker in Spain. For the last decade of his life, his passion has been: One world, One Vote! Over the last few years, a contest began sponsored by the State Department and Youtube called “The Democracy Challenge!” with the contest being hosted for logged in Youtube users over here at Youtube.

Now, this client had his own Youtube channel, however…we decided for this effort, we would create a new channel altogether to populate promo videos with. Knowing the client had spent the last 10 years shooting footage for his feature length movie, we knew there was no shortage of footage for promo videos to seed Youtube with. Knowing that not all of these videos would catch fire, but some would…we began our job to optimize the videos and the channel they resided in.

This being the semi-finals, he had already made the cut out of approximately 900 videos to begin with over a year ago…he had made the cut to the semi-finals. The voting commenced on May 15th and lasted until June 15th for logged in Youtube users and all they had to do was to visit the Democracy Challenge section on YouTube then select any of the 18 videos to the right and vote them up by clicking a Green Thumb, or voting them down by clicking a Red Thumb. Logged in users could vote once daily over the course of 30 days.

We had numerous promo videos that garnered over 80,000 views on Youtube. By the time we had been brought onto the project to help raise awareness and visibility to get the word out to come and Vote for: WORLD VOTE NOW(click here to see the winning video). Yes, Joel Marsden of Spain was one of the 6 Grand Prize Winners. “What does he win Bob?” Well, this is what was up for grabs:

* An all-expense-paid trip to Washington, D.C., New York and Hollywood.
* Gala screenings of the winning videos in Hollywood, New York and Washington
* Exposure to filmmakers and the U.S. film and television industry.
* Meetings with democracy advocates from government, media and civil society.

With these winners receiving their awards, as in previous years, from Hillary Clinton while in Washington.

Once again, we used successful Social Media Optimization to help raise public awareness and to of course engage them while inciting them to log in at Youtube…and VOTE! Which they did.

For those of you who have similar needs, do not hesitate to drop me an email and we’ll be happy to have our team evaluate your needs for free. Feel free to contact me directly at: daron @ wmr.fm or you can buzz my office at 954-736-4170.

Congrats again to Joel Marsden, you deserve it after 10 years of hard work. Good luck!