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!

As part of the recently released Salesforce Service Cloud 2, “Salesforce for Twitter” is included for all new and existing Salesforce customers. Not only can you use the tool to monitor hashtags, keywords, and/or Twitter accounts — but these incoming Twitter messages can be integrated into the existing CRM system as business leads.

What this means is that you can then easily identify, track, and communicate directly with these leads to provide answers to their questions in your area of expertise, and keep abreast of problems that your product or service can solve. You can then track Twitter just as you do your other marketing avenues, thereby measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your Twitter interactions.

Twitter has, for many, been somewhat difficult to measure in terms of marketing value, compared to your other marketing avenues. For Twitter marketers – those running Salesforce.com anyway – this feature promises to be a huge step forward toward managing leads from Twitter marketing along side those from other marketing efforts.

Today I talked to Ash Sud – internet entrepreneur, and founder of AdPoppr (a widget that aims to help website owners, bloggers, and affiliate marketers create unique customized footer ads to increase online customer conversions) – about the use of Twitter as a marketing tool.

R3R: How are things coming along with AdPoppr? Getting close to launch?

Ash: I’m going to launch the beta of AdPoppr in two weeks so I am excited about that. The developed product is nearly ready – just making some changes on it now, both design wise and functionality wise. I’m getting all the changes/fixes completed between Wednesday and Friday next week.  As long as things go smoothly I’ll launch a beta version on that following Monday.

R3R: Are you still planning to lean on Twitter as a platform to get your message out? I ask because I’m starting to question the effectiveness of Twitter for my own marketing efforts. I’m seeing a reduced clickthrough lately – and I have a theory as to why. What are you seeing?

Ash: Twitter is definitely part of the strategy but I’m also going to ask bloggers who try it to do blog about their experience with AdPoppr. What’s your theory about Twitter?

R3R: My Twitter theory is pretty simple, actually. 3,000 followers is as effective today as 300 followers was last year ago – partly because all your followers are also following so many other people. So, your message just doesn’t get seen by as large a percentage of your followers as it once did. So, in order for Twitter to be an effective marketing tool you have to grow your follower list at a faster rate than your followers grow the list of people they follow. That could prove difficult. That’s what I’m seeing, anyway. By tracking the clicks on the URL’s I post (using bit.ly), I know I used to get 2x to 3x the clicks with only half the followers.

Ash: Well a couple things that affect the clickthrough.  One, you have to test and see what time of the day and what types of links gets a high CTR. Also, it’s ok to delete a tweet about something you tweeted at Noon today and then re-tweet it at 6pm to get different eyeballs to view it.

R3R: You’re totally right. My results are based on aggregated data, though: my last 20 tweets with links, for example, compared to 20 or so links when I had only half the followers I do now…all posted at different times of day. On average, I got about 2x to 3x the number of clicks on a link a month or two ago, compared to my more recent links.

It’s not a statistically significant study – just anecdotal. There could be a number of influences on link clickthrough rate, like the fact that when I first started to see reduced clickthroughs I began to use Twitter a little less frequently. But it’s pretty clear to me that my 3,000+ followers are not as valuable (from a marketing perspective) as my 1,500 followers were just 3 months ago. Are you seeing the same thing?

Ash: Yeah. I am definitely seeing the same thing. I think another factor in not seeing significant CTR is the rise of spammer accounts on Twitter. One thing I am getting more of is @replies – significantly more.

R3R: Good point. Marketers are abusing twitter, so other users are getting desensitized to the marketing messages (and probably links, as well). Likewise more of your followers are apt to be marketers themselves. And yes, @replies are on the rise for me, too. Another sign of the proliferation of marketing on Twitter.

Ash: I think people on twitter are starting to treat tweets with links the way they treat a webpage with banner ads. They are starting to ignore them.

Ash’s final point is, I believe, right on the money. But do these anecdotal observations regarding reduced CTR point to the demise of Twitter as a marketing platform. I really don’t think so. Just like with other forms of social media marketing and content marketing, the results you get from Twitter will continue to be influenced by the methods through which you attract your followers, the consistency of your contributions, and the value you add to the network. What this does mean, however, is that Twitter marketing strategy is no longer as simple as building a huge follower list. But the bottom line is that as long as 20 Million (and growing) people are using Twitter, it is going to offer value to marketers whose strategy evolves with their target demographic.

by flickr.com/sookie

Well, we’re not quite half way through 2009, and already it’s been a year of game changers for internet marketing. If you thought you hadn’t seen any good new ways to do business online lately, take a look at some of the newest players.

Microsoft released its new search engine (Bing) that experts are touting as a potential rival to Google’s search dominance; Twitter continues to be debated by the public, but embraced by businesses and marketers; and just last week Google itself announced the private launch of its apparently revolutionary online communication tool called Wave.

Add to this all the host of other popular “social media marketing” tools – like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg, StumbleUpon, and oh yeah, don’t forget blogs – and you can see that long gone are the days of “if you build it they will come.” The game has been changing constantly since the internet became a legitimate avenue for marketing – and 2009 will be no different.

And yes, all of those sites named above can be effectively used to market your business. Want to learn more? Check out some of our most recent blog posts, or drop a line any time.

There are literally hundreds of Twitter apps (see the Twitter Wiki for a comprehensive list), but here we have compiled a short list of the tools that we currently use, and that we find make our Twitter experiences much more enjoyable…and effective:

Desktop Applications: What’s the Easiest Way to Tweet?

• TweetDeck: TweetDeck has many great features that enable the user to perform a variety of options simultaneously, within one window (albeit that window may have many columns). You can perform Twitter searches, filter your Tweets, track trends, upload pictures , record a 12seconds video, and much more. TweetDeck only supports one Twitter account a time, so if you have multiple accounts that you manage you may need to try another tool.
• Twhirl: Twhirl is the client that I regularly use since I can manage my multiple accounts within one user-friendly program. Twhirl also has a number of useful features such as live searching, saved searches, uploading pictures, tweet filtering, URL shortening, and more.

Smart Phone Applications: For Tweeting on the Go

• Twitterberry: This is the most popular Twitter application for the Blackberry, but that doesn’t make it great. The current version (0.8) leaves much to be desired – there are a ton of basic Twitter functions that just aren’t available in the software right now. But at least you can do the basics – check your Twitter feed, and easily tweet from your crackberry – and hey, it’s free.
• Twitterific: This popular application for the iPhone costs $14.95, but is supposedly far superior to comparable Blackberry apps (as are most iPhone apps).

Trend Trackers: So You Know What’s Hot

• Twitter Search: Visiting this page allows you to search Twitter for anything you enter in the search bar, but it also gives you the 10 most popular topics people are tweeting about.
• What the Trend?: Okay, so now you know the 10 most popular topics, but have no idea what they represent or why people are discussing it. This website not only lists the trends, but also provides an explanation of why people are tweeting about them. Clicking on the trend will give you the latest tweets, news, and pictures relating to the topic.
• TwitterCounter: This tool lets you see how many followers you (or anyone else) has right now, compared to the past several months. These days everyone’s all about who has the most followers (see: Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN Twitter Battle). 

URL Shorteners: Because You Only Have 140 Characters

• Bit.ly: Bit.ly is the only URL shortener that I use since it is simple and the free account tracks the statistics of my posted links. I have bit.ly as a bookmark button in my browser and when I am on a web page whose URL I want to shorten. Twhirl integrates with my Bit.ly account, too – which means I can shorten links using Bit.ly from within the Twhirl software.
• There are a bunch of URL shorteners out there, including the original tinyurl.com, and the popular tr.im. SearchEngineLand recently reviewed these and a dozen others.

Auto-Follow Tools: To Get More Followers

• Hummingbird for Twitter – this paid tool helps you increase your number of “followers,” by allowing you to automatically follow large groups of people, understanding that many of them will follow you back. The software also allows you to just as easily un-follow anyone who didn’t follow you back after a period of time. This technique of growing your list of followers is currently popular among marketers and businesses promoting themselves online. The software costs $197 as of this post, so it’s only for serious Twitter marketers trying to promote a product or service.

These are just some of the tools that help us maximize our Twitter experience – it’s definitely not a comprehensive list, and new tools seem to be popping up every day, so it will be interesting to see how different our Twitter tools post might be in 6 months or a year.

People wondered whether Twitter’s 140-character limit would render the tool useless, and that’s undoubtedly become a moot point (it’s even spurred mini-mockumentary style spoofs about even shorter character requirements (see Flutter)). So, I see no reason why 12 seconds of video couldn’t be a way more people start expressing themselves.

The significance of the fact that Shaq has used 12seconds.tv (albeit only once as of this posting) is that he’s been credited with some of the boost in Twitter’s user base. This correlation led Jennifer Van Grove of Mashable to speculate about a potential “Shaq effect” on 12seconds.tv. The same blogger mentioned (waaay) back in February that 12seconds.tv started offering closer integration with Twitter (via an app called TweetDeck), enabling users to easily “tweet” their 12 second videos. This could make 12seconds.tv a natural extension of Twitter for those whom plain text just isn’t enough – and I can at least see the novelty, possibly even genuine appeal.

So, why only 12 seconds? Here’s the explanation from the site:

“Because anything longer is boring. The scientists here at the 12seconds dodecaplex have conducted countless hours of research to determine the precise amount of time it takes for boredom or apathy to set in during typical Internet video viewing. Our patent pending Electro-Tear-Duct Prongers have determined that exactly 12 seconds of video is the ideal amount of time to keep anything interesting.”

Hmm. There’s a tad of sarcasm in that blurb, but maybe they actually did a little bit of research on the subject, and are just making light of it. I suppose time will tell. If 11seconds.tv or 13seconds.tv hits more of a chord with the users, then we’ll know.

[Thanks to Vitaly G. of Sputnik for telling me to check out 12seconds.tv this morning.]

With all the talk about Twitter these days, people are acting like it’s going to revolutionize the way people interact online (I have to admit, I do now consider Twitter at the heart of at least an internet evolution – there’s more to it than you might think). But as cool and useful as Twitter might be for some, if you’re looking only at the next best thing for marketing, and you ignore the power of traditional internet tools like email, and slightly newer tools like blogs, then you could be missing the boat in a big way. Not to say Twitter and Facebook might not be great additions to your marketing mix, but don’t count out the old tried and true.

If you’re part of the (sizeable) camp that still says “what’s the big deal about Twitter – isn’t it just a bunch of status updates?” Then it’s definitely time for you to look a little closer – especially if you have a product or service to promote. Create an account – it’s free (at http://twitter.com/) – and then…

…follow R3R on Twitter: http://twitter.com/r3r
…follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jreither

But to my point, the this blog isn’t going anywhere any time soon.