Social media "shares" impact search results

Recent industry studies indicate that search engine rankings are measurably affected by social media activity. The undeniable fact is that search and social media are growing ever more intertwined, but according to eMarketer, about 70% of top brands don’t manage their Facebook page to account for its impact on search at all.

Google, the search giant, is continuing to make significant investments in social media. Last month Google bought PostRank, a social media analytics tool. And then they launched the Google+ (Google Plus) social network which has become the fastest growing social networking site ever.

Facebook, the current king of social networking, understanding the power of its domain within search results, recently teamed up with a search engine optimization (SEO) research firm and issued a white paper on “social SEO.” Among the findings in the whitepaper were that businesses, even those that practice optimization on their websites or blogs, don’t put much effort toward making their Twitter, Facebook or YouTube pages search engine friendly.

It’s clear that a strong social component is seeping into search engine algorithms. Facebook “likes,” Twitter “re-tweets,” and Google “Plus-1′s” are all indicative of good social media engagement and are favored by search engines.

Many companies continue to treat the areas of search and social media as distinctly separate online marketing initiatives, but those that recognize the importance of this converging space of search and social media are adopting a more holistic online marketing strategy.

Photo via sofiabudapest

Social media marketing – such as on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn – has been perceived by many businesses as a stand-alone effort, one that could be executed in a separate silo from search engine optimization (SEO). But as SEOmoz examined the top 30 ranking results for over 10,000 Google searches performed late last month they found a significant correlation between links which were shared on Facebook and higher Google rankings.

SEOmoz was careful to point out that the study did not indicate causation; it merely highlights the correlation that may indicate the direct influence Facebook sharing has on Google rankings. As the researchers pointed out, however, Google’s public statements about the influence of social media on search rankings do support the idea of causation. As with everything related to Google’s search ranking algorithm, the Facebook/Google relationship is not as simple as “more Shares = better ranking”. For example, Google has indicated that there is some consideration of “author authority” – a key-influencer’s Facebook share may be measured and weighted more heavily in search rankings.

It is clear that social media (Facebook, specifically) will continue to have a growing impact on search engine results, which only further solidifies the argument that businesses should at least consider the social media giant as a part of their online marketing strategy.

Photo via ChannelShip; Chart via SEOmoz.org

How do you measure success?

For any remaining doubters regarding whether social media has the ability to contribute to a business’ bottom line, a recent eMarketer article (via Hubspot) highlighted how the use of two social media outlets greatly increased the volume of monthly sales leads for small and medium sized businesses (SMB’s). The effective use of Twitter led to a doubling of lead volume in some cases, while frequently updated blogs bumped results by 40 percent (compared to businesses of the same size that did not use Twitter or blogs).

Creating a community of followers through Twitter and a regularly updated stream of content on a blog builds engagement, boosts the company’s presence on Google and ultimately bring in more potential customers.

Adoption of social media as a marketing platform for SMB’s is growing, and smart companies are taking cues from leaders in their industries – which are often much larger companies.

USAA’s Private Social Media Platform Boosts the Bottom Line

In a compelling case study of USAA (an insurance, banking and investment provider for military personnel and their families), the company built their own social media platform on their site. The platform allows customers to rate and review USAA’s products and services. Leads are measured by online applications and quotes received. In the first year since implementation of this social media feature, they have seen an additional ~16,000 products/policies sold.

USAA built its reputation and grew its member base largely through word-of-mouth. But in this digital age, USAA recognized the growing shift in how customers research and purchase products, and adapted its view to see social media and online user-generated content, including ratings and reviews, as the digital evolution of that word-of-mouth concept.

Small Insurance Agency’s Unconventional Facebook Policy Generates Leads

In the case of ISU Insurance Services – ARMAC agency, a family owned insurance agency in California utilizing social media metrics to guide their marketing strategy, CEO Krystal McEachron set up an Intranet to track all their social media activity on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. She then watched what specific social media activities led to an increase in traffic and leads via their website. For ISU ARMAC online marketing through social media has literally replaced the Yellow Pages, bringing in a couple hundred new leads each month. Facebook is their third largest source of leads, per the case study article.

Krystal also discovered that the greatest number of Facebook click-throughs to the corporate website came from individual employee Facebook pages (after employees comment and share regarding blogs or new content added to the fan page). She now encourages employees to update their individual Facebook pages during work hours – an atypical practice, as many small to medium businesses actually block access to social media sites.

Establish a Baseline and Track Your Results

A major benefit of digital marketing is all the user activity and web analytics that can be measured, giving you insight into which marketing campaigns had the greatest impact. This wealth of data that was never available with traditional advertising/marketing (newspapers, magazines, and television) is still under-utilized by SMB’s in general. Just establish a baseline and track your results!

How do you judge the success of your social media efforts? Website traffic? Leads? Brand awareness? Customer retention? Overwhelmingly, the metric of choice for service businesses is leads. Brand awareness and customer retention can be difficult to measure or attribute to a specific marketing campaign, and website traffic is nice, but it’s typically measured in aggregate and is not the web’s best measure of real customer engagement. A lead is the first step in identifying an individual consumer online, and therefore can be tracked all the way through the sales process to give a very granular idea of  a marketing campaign’s return on investment.

Photo credit: StevenHarris

Making Friends and Influencing Others

Among what Retail Info Systems News (RIS) considers the the top nine retailers in social media, there is not a single retailer that qualifies as a stand-out on more than one of the top three social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube). Even with their deep pockets these companies haven’t attained leadership levels of success on more than one channel – a focused social media marketing approach that smaller businesses can learn from.

In a recent blog from RIS, editor Joe Skorupa researched the top retailers utilizing the big three social media sites. He meant to compile a top ten list of leaders across all channels but he was disappointed to discover that there were not ten retailers who had dominant success across all three social media channels – there was not even one. In the end, Joe was forced to only name nine retailers that had a leading presence in one of the three channels.

His criteria were a million fans on Facebook; 10,000 followers on Twitter; or 100,000 channel views along with 500,000 upload views on YouTube. The companies who achieved at least one of these metrics (in alphabetical order) were Best Buy, Forever 21, Gap, Home Depot, REI, Sears, Target, Wal-Mart, and Whole Foods.

Knowing that none of these big name retailers have been able to dominate all three top social media channels offers a couple lessons in social media marketing: effective marketing and brand building via social media is much more complex than it appears; and dividing resources to conquer multiple channels is a likely path to mediocrity.

Photo credit: Luc Legay

Your clients are talking. Are you listening?

You may have heard before that you should listen, not just talk (i.e. push your products and services) when using social media. But what does that mean? You should be listening for what exactly? And, how does this all relate to your business goals?

Put simply, you should be listening to what your potential clients have to say, because they are telling you things (about themselves, about their wants and needs) that you don’t yet know.

The biggest potential of social media is that it can be a two-way conversation. On Twitter, you might post a link to your company’s latest blog, published article, or white paper. You may push summaries about an up-coming senior executive speaking engagement or hosted webinar to Facebook and LinkedIn groups related to your industry. And although this type of one-way social media communication is the extent of most companies’ social media strategies, it is only one piece of the social media puzzle (it’s the “talking” piece). What about the “listening” piece? Relatively little attention is given to the ongoing conversations already happening – those not initiated by corporate efforts. This is a huge omission in many social media strategies, but an easy one to correct.

A great case study on the toy manufacturer LEGO, shared by Jake McKee, their former Global Community Development Manager, provides concrete examples of how listening, rather than just talking, can actually boost the bottom line.

Best practices to take away from this case study:

1. Listen to understand who actually is your best customer or client. A policy of not listening to customers can create a misleading impression of who your customer base is (otherwise known as corporate tunnel vision). At LEGO, management thought that their sweet spot was 7 to 12 year old boys, who on the average purchased $10 of product a year. Turns out that the 18 year old plus/adult market, spending an average $2,000 a year, was their long neglected growth opportunity – and they were quite vocal (online) about their love for LEGO. LEGO’s old pricing cap was $150, until this better understanding of their potential customers resulted in the development of bestselling sets at the $300, $400 and $500 price points.
2. Listen to hear what your potential customers and clients want or need. You should visit online forums and communities to see what are the questions raised by the average person looking for your type of products or services. This may result in new product or service ideas – or easier yet, bundles of existing services – to be offered by your company. Upon discovering that independent LEGO reseller marketplace sites existed for customers wanting to purchase parts to build their own designs, LEGO offered a profitable new service that allows customers to order their own custom designed sets online.
3. Ask some questions and then listen to arrive at points one and two (above). A major goal of social media for business is to engage and interact with consumers (that’s listening, plus talking/responding). After listening to your consumers, request your online followers to tell you what they think about issues affecting your business, your products, or services. Be careful that your questions are not leading, nor do they reveal your future business strategy to your competitors. It can be a casual conversation, or you can take advantage of the multitude of poll/survey features offered by social media platforms. The feedback can be invaluable.

Salespeople learn early in their careers to ask questions to determine a customer’s needs before pitching a product or service. A dream situation is when this information is provided by the customer without asking. This is social media in a nutshell. Your new client base is online and they’re saying, “here is what I need” and “this is how you can help me.” All you have to do is listen!

In actuality, the Ziggs website (still in beta mode) offers a place for users to control their online presence, as well as act as an organizational tool for both personal and professional use. Creating “the most elegant profile style available on the web,” Ziggs attempts to provide a space for you to enter information that you want to appear in people’s search results. You can use the free service that claims to naturally elevate your profile in search results due to their page rank status, or you can pay $4.95/month for a sponsored profile to increase your visibility.

So what makes it so different from your Facebook or LinkedIn profile?

• The biggest difference (aside from the fact that they offer this paid search engine marketing service), according to Ziggs, is their tracking feature. It sends you email alerts tracking the number of visitors to your profile, where the visitors were located, what keywords they used to find you, and whether they found you thru Yahoo!, Google, MSN, etc.
• Ziggs is partnered with PayPal, so users can make payments to the different vendors or contractors that you work with, directly from your profile
• They have an Expedia application that allows you to make travel arrangements using information on the profile
• You can purchase Amazon gift cards and reload your Starbuck’s cards from their website…random, but could be useful in a pinch
• You can import your contacts and organize them into groups – even if they aren’t Ziggs members

Just like most other social networking sites, Ziggs also enables you to upload pictures, chat with others, use their message center, join groups, and post and apply to jobs. Time will tell if their other unique features will help to distinguish them from their competitors or not. In the meantime, you can bet we will be testing it out.

You don’t have do be a 13 year old screaming fan to have heard of the Jonas Brothers by now. Even if you don’t know what they look like you’ve probably heard one or two of their teen pop rock tunes. Anyway, they’re a big deal in some circles…every eye in the teenage kingdom is on these guys…that’s all I’m saying.

Social Media and Sponsorships on JonasBrothers.com

The pop idols’ website dedicates about 85% (of the interactive space) of their home page to links and banners which take you to external social media sites (like Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and iLike). Look at the home page – the 3 most prominent sections are really just direct links to Flickr (a photo sharing site), MySpace (a social networking site), and YouTube (a video sharing site) – you’d think that there wasn’t any actual content on JonasBrothers.com itself.

Additionally there are banners in the lower-left corner that take you to Facebook (another social networking site) and iLike (a social music sharing site). 3 other banners link you straight to Amazon (to buy their CD), and to BreakfastBreaks (a breakfast cereal sponsor).

What’s left? Just a link to their fan club website, and a place for fans to leave a “shout out.” There is a menu in the header that takes you to other pages of the site, but it’s definitely not the main attraction.

The Jonas Brothers marketing people apparently believe that socia media is an effective way to spread their brand. And considering that you can’t get away from the Jonas Brothers brand these days, I’m gonna go ahead and say they know what they’re doing.

The main point here is that JonasBrothers.com has made great use of social media, but they didn’t try to create these social networks on their own site. They used existing networks (YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, etc.) and leveraged the success those sites already have with their demographic. You can’t beat ‘em – so join ‘em. Smart kids.

Here are the social media websites that were most discussed and favored at Affiliate Summit:

• Twitter: Twitter is extremely popular within the Affiliate Summit crowd. In one session, the panelists were twittering while they were presenting and using Twitter as their Q&A platform. Some businesses use Twitter to build brand awareness, create customer service portals, perform research & development, and build communities. Zappo’s success with Twitter was repeatedly mentioned (http://twitter.zappos.com/).
• Facebook: Facebook can be a great tool for advertising your brand and/or building communities surrounding your product or service. There are viral marketing methods (building a group or page) as well as targeted paid advertisements available to increase exposure. Because of its fairly recent popularity, there isn’t too much information known about the success or failure rates of advertising on Facebook yet, but hopefully there will be some data available in the near future (we will keep you posted).
• Friendfeed: Friendfeed is a website that can monitor and provide alerts about the different web activity that you and/or your contacts participate in (Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, RSS feeds, etc.). This is still in the early adoption phase, and was more mentioned as a site to keep on the radar more than anything else.
• Seesmic: Seesmic is a website that is a combination of YouTube and Twitter. The user uploads a video, other users reply with their own videos, and (poof!) a video conversation has been created. Just like on Twitter, you can follow users that you like – you just get video updates instead of text.

As time passes, internet marketers will only learn more about each of these websites and their contribution to the success of a company’s marketing plan. We will do our best to keep you updated with what we have found to work best for us and our clients.