It seems every major corporation and conglomerate has grokked on to social media as a broadcasting tool. As a result, there’s a drive for businesses of all types and sizes to make the leap from ‘broadcasting at’ to ‘communicating with’.
It’s a great idea for businesses and entrepreneurs to get inside the minds of their followers and fans. You have access to a wealth of feedback and inside information about your services through the eyes of your actual clients.
Having said that, if you operate in a town like Nanaimo with only 80,000 people you’ll be facing some challenges before a social media campaign starts working for you. Here are my ten tips for making social media work in a smaller market.
1) Tweeting is a luxury that you probably can’t afford.
Twitter is cool, but there isn’t much to be gained beyond the glory of tweeting. Realistically, you just won’t get a huge amount of followers, those followers won’t convert to business and unless you’re really active, most of what you say will get lost in the crowd. If you have a small hotel or restaurant you may see some success by posting ‘web only’ specials. I really only recommend it for businesses with 50 employees or more, or those who are already spending a lot of time marketing their business online.
2) Blogging is still awesome.
Blogging is still a great way to generate content, build links and boost your search rankings. Most hosting accounts come free with WordPress or some other blogging CMS and support text, images and videos.
3) Lifestreaming is the new blogging.
I could dedicate a whole post to this. Lifestreaming is a new way of documenting the activities surrounding your life using a chronologically-ordered collection of information. For instance, I have everything connected to my WordPress Blog including my twitter feed, my deviantART account, my Facebook fan page and my LinkedIn profile. I get good, link rich content and a free post every week with links to my activity around the web. Watch out for more like this in 2010, as the trend will be to invent new ways to aggregate everything for me in one place. It takes a bit to wrap your mind around it, but a good place to start is here.
4) Facebook fan pages.
Don’t link to your personal Facebook profile for business use unless they’re inseparable. Creating a fan page allows you to have the same posting and communicating ability, but limits customers to only seeing business related content, not your cousin Judd’s halava recipe.
5) Social media is the tortoise, not the hare.
Slow and steady wins the race. A new friend here, a new connection there. Unless you’re Gary Vaynerchuk, you should just be content to spend no more than an hour a day on social media marketing campaigns.
6) Examine your goals before diving in.
Different social media campaigns can get different results. Blogging will increase rankings and SEO, but isn’t always a great sales tool. Twitter may give a temporary boost of traffic, but the effects aren’t long lasting. Flickr is a great way to share photos, but won’t generate much for new business. You can increase chances of conversion with custom landing pages and links, but these strategies are usually beyond the purveyance (and budget) of most small business entrepreneurs.
7) Maybe you don’t need it at all.
Ignore all of the networks, TV shows, superstars, pundits and adverts and examine what your actual market is. Are there any other general contractors on Twitter? Are there any CGAs with Facebook pages? What % of people in Nanaimo do you think are on Twitter? What’s the dialogue like for the average entrepreneur? If you don’t see anyone doing it in your industry, don’t look at it as an opportunity to reach an untapped market, because it probably isn’t.
8) Try before you buy.
Organization and timing are very important and it will take you several hours to set up the social channels so before you commit to branded social media pages, launch a test campaign and see how you feel about the results. A simple one or two week campaign in the beginning is a great way to gauge the response of your customers to this type of marketing
9) How will you inform people?
If you build it, it will sit there. That’s my new motto for 2010, because it’s not enough anymore to just build a site and profile. Conventional SEO (page titles and content) are just a foundation these days and unless you are alone in the market, are probably not sufficient to build up decent rankings. Having a twitter page and a Facebook page will not entice people to communicate with you, you have to work it and continually provide value. Asking people to join is a great way, if you have a newsletter list. Advertise on your web site, and incentivize people who join and follow you with exclusive promotions.
10) Who dares, wins.
It’s not that the internet is dominated by 17 year old’s with a penchant for lolcats, it’s that the internet is dominated by 17 year old’s with a penchant for lolcats. Edgy content wins every time, so you’re better off having a video of a car driving through your front widow or a faux haunting than you are having walkthrough tours of your custom built character home. I’ve often said that a great social media campaign is one that gets people who would never use your product or service to talk about it.
That about sums it up, of course it’s up to you to decide if social media marketing is right for your clients. Be organized, be daring and you could be the next willitblend. You never know!
This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on March 8, 2010 at 1:51 pm, filed under Marketing, Social Media and tagged Blog, Facebook, Tips, Twitter. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
I’ve been having an unrequited love affair with semicolons for some time now. Oh, if you look through my posts you won’t be likely to find any; I haven’t been comfortable that I’m using them correctly when I write. That is, until now. Inspired by a 2009 post on Daggle titled conjunction complex sentence misfunction that Danny Sullivan twote this afternoon and a recent comic by The Oatmeal titled: How to use a semicolon: The most feared punctuation on earth, I’ve decided to bring semicolons into my life more.
5 ways I’m bringing the semicolon into my life.
- I will use “and”, “but” and other conjunctions less; I will confidently use commas and semicolons instead.
- I will make more winkies in chat programs; I will discover other emoticons that require semicolons.
Ok, that’s only two. I’m sure I can come up with three more. Follow me on Twitter to see what they are!
You may be wondering what this has to do with link building. Stay tuned, I’m making my next post about it.
This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on February 2, 2010 at 7:40 pm, filed under Copywriting and tagged Blog, Copywriting. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Applied Theory is a web comic about axioms, models, theories, maxims, principles, laws and postulates. This is the first issue. Click on the comic for a larger version. Also, go ahead and download it, share it, hot link to it, repost it or whatever – just leave the copyright intact.
This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on January 26, 2010 at 7:26 pm, filed under Content Marketing and tagged Blog, Harbour City SEO, Web Design. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
All this talk about privacy, I didn’t even have a privacy policy on my site.
It’s a massive oversight on my part, something I should have done as soon as I set up a contact form and launched a newsletter signup form. If you collect information from your visitors, it’s never too late to put a policy on your site. If you don’t know where to start, there are plenty online. You could even link to this one, or copy mine and edit it to suit your needs.
Harbour City SEO: Privacy Policy
This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on January 21, 2010 at 8:15 pm, filed under Privacy and tagged Blog, Harbour City SEO, Reference. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
I don’t want to sound like a nerd, (ok, maybe I do), but I was just reading a paper called ‘tagging human knowledge’ by Paul Heymann, Andreas Paepcke, Hector Garcia-Molina. Because I’ve been speaking recently about categorization and taxonomy and their importance in defining relationships of things, I completely neglected tagging as a viable method of organization. I didn’t forget about it, but I didn’t think it was as reliable as a system organized by taxonomy experts and librarians.
A fundamental premise of tagging systems is that regular users can organize large collections for browsing and other tasks using uncontrolled vocabularies. Until now, that premise has remained relatively unexamined. Using library data, we test the tagging approach to organizing a collection. We find that tagging systems have three major large scale organizational features: consistency, quality, and completeness.
In addition to testing these features, we present results suggesting that users produce tags similar to the topics designed by experts, that paid tagging can effectively supplement tags in a tagging system, and that information integration may be possible across tagging systems.
The conclusion? In a nutshell, organizing content by tagging works as well (if not better) than organizing content using library systems. Furthermore, it turns out that non qualified, non-paid individuals were just as effective at organizing content ans librarians and taxonomists.
I used to think that tagging wouldn’t work, just because there were too many random factors when you ask a person without knowledge of a thing to categorize a certain thing (that’s what tagging is, essentially) and couple it with financial motives. I still think commercial applications of tagging are too open to manipulation, but it’s good to know that the system works.
Applications for tagging in SEO
So here’s where I decide to start using tagging more effectively on Harbour City SEO. Play along at home if you like.
1st. Go to delicious.com. Type in the main keyword you’re targeting into their search box. I did “SEO”. Then I look at the first page of results. All of the sites on there are ones I’m familiar with and pace a certain amount of trust with, so I take down the details of the tags I see them using.
2nd. Take the common occurrences of tags and put them aside. I eliminated any tags that only occurred once.
3rd. Take the remaining list of tags and insert them into your tag structure if you’re using WordPress or another CMS that supports tagging. If you’re not using a system with built in tagging capabilities, make sure the keywords are somewhere on your page.
This is the list I came up with:
- keywords
- marketing
- ranking
- reference
- search
- seo
- tips
- tools
- webdesign
I’ll be sure to include those tags for my SEO strategy, as they should help increase relevance for my topics and usability for visitors. Sweet sassy molassey, I’m excited to finally be using tags with confidence. How about you, are you ready?
This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on January 15, 2010 at 3:18 pm, filed under Search Engine Optimization and tagged Blog, Keywords, SEO, Tips. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
It’s surprising to me how many websites are still being built without a thought to future online marketing efforts. What I find especially surprising are the number of web development frameworks and tools that were built without a single thought of search engine optimization.
When I develop a website these days, whether it’s for personal or professional use, one of the first questions I ask is “Is this site going to be difficult to optimize? What are the barriers to achieving my goals?”
I’ve compiled a list of content management systems and frameworks that I’ve worked with, ranging from the simplest to the most difficult to optimize. If something is impossible, or nearly impossible to optimize – even if the price is right, I usually won’t consider it for a project unless nothing else will achieve the laid out directives.
Ranking of content management systems by ease of optimization.
9. Homestead
Homestead is a complete solution for website owners. The monthly fee includes items like web hosting and a small website. The pros are a short list. Manage everything in one place, easy to learn and use. The cons, well, for one – there’s no source control. You can’t have access to the code, even if you want to. Custom titles are a no go. Custom design is equally no go. You usually have a fixed number of content items (5 pages for $x) and very little power to alter the existing structure. Plus, you can’t move to another host without losing everything. There are others like it, such as Vistaprint. In general, these sites are not much bang for your buck and are often more expensive than a ‘free’ CMS like WordPress or Joomla.
8. Flash built sites
Forget it. Having a flash site is choosing the opposite of easy search engine optimization. The rasterized text can’t be read. The pages aren’t pages. You may as well have a blank page up there, unless SEO isn’t a consideration.
7. Anything in .asp or a windows environment
Many corporate, big box type sites are developed using .asp. Don’t go anywhere near this unless you’re an .asp programmer. SEO for these types of sites is a nightmare at the best of times.
6. Joomla
While I’m fairly proficient with Joomla SEO, it’s taken me a long time to get there. Joomla has struggled with providing users the configuration necessary to optimize a site properly. There are third party plugins available, but they’re a bit daunting to say the least. Things can go horribly awry if you don’t know what you’re doing, I’ve even been approached by other SEO agencies who aren’t comfortable working with the extensions.
5. Any e-commerce system.
E-commerce systems, like Magento, Virtuemart, OScommerce, Volution and others have strange rules. You often need to download an extension to optimize them well, and even then they’re not self explanatory.
4. Sites using Dreamweaver templates
Dreamweaver allows you to use a template to set global styles for s website. The problem is that once your template is set, you’re often locked into it and cutting out parts of the code to make it easier to optimize is a challenge.
3. Custom built PHP sites
Sites built in PHP can be as easy to optimize ans anything, if the developer thought about SEO when they built it. The problem is that they usually don’t, so the elements required to do proper SEO are not available. If you know PHP, or know someone who does, you can easily make the necessary changes. You are required to have a working knowledge of the elements you would find in the <head> section of your web page to make this happen. This is generally my preferred way of doing things.
2. Custom built HTML sites
If a site uses only HTML, it’s easy to optimize. The hardest part of doing this is gaining the working knowledge of HTML and FTP programs, so you can effectively download and manipulate your website.
1. WordPress, blogging platforms
WordPress is by far the easiest SEO I have ever done. WP sites get indexed quickly, the extensions for enabling optimization are free and easy to use, and optimization itself is all done via a simple extension to your blog’s posting interface. When I launch a new site, I always start with WordPress to build traction and develop another site in the background.
Sometimes you need a specific solution to achieve your goals, so you have to find the right balance. If you don’t speak HTML, or if a blog doesn’t have the features you need, you may have to use a CMS like Joomla. If you need to sell product, then your shopping cart is more important than initial ease of SEO. But you should always ask the question of your developer or agency, or yourself if you build it on your own. There are few things more painful than building a site with lofty goals of search engine success to only discover later that you’ll be ice skating uphill to get there.
This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on January 4, 2010 at 2:45 pm, filed under Marketing and tagged Blog, Marketing, Web Design. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
My previous post on the new Google features was published today (June 5th) at 11:48am
The screenshot of the search result below was taken about 5 minutes ago. I’m not certain why this post was indexed so quickly while others remain un-updated. It definitely calls for experimenting.
Search Results from June 5th, 2009 at about 12:45 pm PST
I do know that blogs tend to get indexed a bit more quickly than standard sites with a fixed navigation path to static content. My theory is that blogs are current, and so, more relevant. It seems to be working for me, which is exciting. I’ve seen nothing but steady growth since I started this blog a couple of weeks ago.
This entry was written by Sean Enns, posted on June 5, 2009 at 1:03 pm, filed under Search Engine Optimization and tagged Blog, Google, SEO, Tips. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.