Content marketing is the practice of creating informational and creative material that is relevant and interesting to potential customers (as well as people who can influence your potential customers) with the aim of drawing loyalty and future business from them. It is not direct sales.

It is a quickly growing and targeted method of marketing that is replacing some of the outdated traditional methods that businesses are finding decreasing success with.

The Art of Content Marketing

Those who effectively content market are able to engage their readers and leave them wanting to come back again and again for more. This drives brand recognition and understanding of the company and shows that that, regardless of what product it sells, it has something to offer them. They create something that is interesting in and of itself, regardless of what it may also be promoting.

Good content writers make the customers want to continue reading and good content marketers leave them wanting more.

Most content marketing involves educating the customer in some way. Many big name brands use educating their consumer base to draw people to their sites and improve the public’s understanding of what their company is, what it provides, and what it can do for them.

Some of the biggest uses of this type of marketing are IBM’s “Cityone” game that boasts thousands of players from all around the world, General Electric’s “Ecomagination” that inspires people to contribute and learn about the latest environmental innovations, and Google’s “Zero Moment of Truth” that describes the behavior and habits of customers just before they make the decision to buy something.

The Benefit Of More Information

The world is changing from an economy where merely seeing a flash of an advertisement out of the corner of one’s eye will implant that idea in their head. Consumers are being bombarded with those kinds of ads everywhere they look and are quickly learning to tune them out altogether.

Content marketing is becoming essential for businesses to bring in customers who actually want to come back time and time again. They successfully work around the overwhelmed consumer base’s natural inclination to tune out anything that hints at being an advertisement and directly target something that no one can effectively resist – that which actually interests them.

Bringing Your Content In Front of Audience

Simply creating good content is not enough. It’s the combination of all sorts of promotion that creates the first wave of exposure (that ideally will fuel itself at some point and will start driving continuous exposure on its own). Making your content findable is still essential:

• Go to high-profile publishers (and possibly automate that). Services like Outbrain and Nrelate bring your content to the highest quality publishers but putting links to your site in “Related” or “Further reading” sections below the high-traffic articles.
• Pay for social media spread (all major social media sites have advertising models that give more exposure to your content through sending more views to your shares: Facebook ads, Twitter ads, StumbleUpon paid discovery, etc). If you have time, you can also try tools like Viral Content Buzz where you don’t really pay for anything but can put your content in front of people who are eager to spread a word
• Contemporary link building still works but it has evolved a lot: here’s a new way to use directories (Best Web Directories Post Panda/Penguin); here’s a new way to use blog commenting (Use Blog Commenting to Get Valuable Backlinks and Traffic); here’s how to do guest blogging properly (The Only Benefit of Guest Blogging that Matters (with Case Studies)) – all of those are geared towards drawing important people to your content before it starts promoting itself.

Conclusion

As more and more companies turn to innovative and fresh ways of integrating their products and brands into something that people actually want to see, the demand for not just good, but excellent content marketing becomes increasingly important for smaller companies as well.

Good content writing on a website can cause a reader not only to come back, but to share good or interesting information with friends who may, in turn, continue sharing with others. A single reader can turn into hundreds of others from around the world that are now introduced to your company. If your content is truly captivating, they may share it with hundreds more each, creating exactly the kind of advertising that every company wants, but can no longer achieve with banner ads and pop ups.

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Ann Smarty

Community Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas

Ann Smarty is the pro blogger and guest blogger, social media enthusiast.

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The post What Is Content Marketing? appeared first on SEO Chat.

Anyone who has a blog should be taking advantage of old content by breathing new life into it. One blog post can have various uses and draw in traffic like you never imagined.

Here are five (technically ten!)ways to re-purpose old content into new link bait.

1. Infographics and Cheatsheets

In a world that is centered so much around social media, it is now necessary to provide content that has been broken down to be both easy to view and to share. Both infographics and cheatsheets apply, giving a bare bones, visual representation of various core concepts (here’s a good example that didn’t event require any design skills). Both of these things are very popular on sites like Pinterest and Facebook, as well as other social sites around the web. Making them a great way to use old content in a new way to draw new links.

How: Here are some easy infographics tools and here are more tools from Moz.

2. Presentations and Slideshows

Lately it has become more common to see presentations instead of traditional articles. A good example are sites like Upworthy, that frequently offer full presentations in slideshow form as a dynamic way of presenting information.

One of my favorite presentations from the site is their explanation of how to make content go viral. That is a great way to present data and engage the reader, including with content that was already made into a standard blog post in the past. Gallery slideshows can also be used, with the description box containing the text broken down for quick context.

How: Haiku Deck – Free Presentation App for iPad

3. Ebooks and Series

One of the easiest ways to repackage content – in a free and fast way – is making it into an ebook.

You can offer them for free, or for a social media ‘like’. If you want to stretch content you can always go back into old posts and find topics that could be made into a larger series. This requires new writing on your part, but it a great way to expand on points brought up in previous content.

How: Tools like Anthologize and Zinepal will do this for you, allowing you to select what posts to include and then editing the format for a chapter book version of your site. WP Beginner is also featuring a great WordPress plugin that can build you Twitter following if you decide to give that pdf away.

4. Videos and Podcasts

More and more videos based on posts for blogs have been showing up on YouTube and Vimeo lately. These are usually just tutorials, sometimes slideshows-style videos. Either way, they work well and give a more visual way to get a point across. Readers who prefer their content moving will like it, and it gives you a new demographic to target.

You could also do podcasts, reading audio versions of posts, having a separate show, having interviews or anything else you might desire. Single Dad Laughing, a blog run by Dan Pearce, is an example of a site that has chosen to go the podcast route in addition to the basic text posts.

How: Videos: Screenr (free, easy and requires no tools to download!) + and then Podcasts: How to Turn YouTube Channels into Subscribable Podcasts

5. Best-Of and Master Lists

One of the first rules I learned about content marketing was the use of lists, like this one here. They are a quick way of giving information, formatted to make it easier for the reader to skin through. Lists, both best-of and master lists of third party or in-site links, are always an effective way of repackaging content. Plus, it allows you to promote an old posts in a new way and so drive traffic back to something you have made before.

How: Easily create round-up articles with this plugin and also try this plugin to build FAQ.

Do you have any ideas for re-purposing content? Let us know in the comments.

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Ann Smarty

Community Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas

Ann Smarty is the pro blogger and guest blogger, social media enthusiast.

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The post 5 Ways to Turn Old Content Into New Link Bait appeared first on SEO Chat.

Sadly, there’s more than one kind of crappy content. For some reason, despite spelling checkers, bad spelling runs rampant on the Internet. Bad grammar also shows up far too often. But there is one kind of crappy content that’s even worse than bad spelling and bad grammar, and that’s pointless content.

Pointless content, by definition, should not exist. It’s the kind of content that does nothing. It doesn’t inform or entertain your visitors; it reveals nothing about your products or services; it just sits there, taking up space. It may be boring or hard to read, and it certainly does not help your visitor to make a choice or convert. Pointless content is content that wasn’t written with your visitors first and foremost in mind.

So how can you keep pointless content from appearing on your website? And if some of your pages do contain such content, how can you improve them? Melissa Fach writing for Search Engine Journal offers some tips to keep in mind. Please note that these are the absolute basics, to be used with your main product and/or service pages.

First, let’s consider your headlines. They should be constructed in such a way that a quick scan reveals or summarizes what the reader will find in that section. Say you offer a variety of accounting services. Your website might include a page that lists all of them, grouped under appropriate headlines: “Accounting Services for Individuals,” “Accounting Services for Small Businesses,” etc. Arranged in this way, your visitors can take in your offerings at a quick glance and know exactly what they’re looking at.

Let’s focus in on one of those headlines – “Accounting Services for Small Businesses,” perhaps. Why does a small business need an accounting service? How will your accounting service help? Answer those questions right away – immediately after the headline. It’s what your visitors really need to know if they’re going to buy your service. If they’re visiting your website, they may already know why they need this service, but hearing it from you will reassure them that you’re on the same page – and hearing why they should buy it from you rather than someone else will help bring about a conversion.

This brings me to my next point about your content: it needs to create trust and persuade. You won’t be able to do the latter without doing the former. For a company that offers accounting services to small businesses, you will probably need to create a high degree of trust, since you’re asking clients to share very sensitive information about their livelihoods – to say nothing of the potential consequences from the IRS if you mess up! So give your visitors the information they need to trust you – include testimonials, years of experience, other background details, etc.

As you write your content, keep your readers in mind. Make sure you tell them why they need the service, how it will benefit them, and why they should choose your company to do the job. Hint: don’t say “Choose us because we need the money.” Everything you write should tell the story from your reader’s perspective. You can and should sell your services, but you may want to do it subtly; let your reader reach the final conclusion.

And now I’m going to contradict that last sentence by reminding you to include a call to action. It doesn’t have to twist a visitor’s arm off, but it needs to tell them what to do next – to avoid confusion, if nothing else. “Send an e-mail to example@CPAservices.com today to set up a free consultation, before the tax season rush” could work for our example accounting firm.

Pulling my marketing hat on even tighter, I’m also going to remind you to upsell, but only for services that might interest your visitor. For example, our accounting firm might offer an add-on session that educates your client on reasonable practices to help organize their financial records for next year. For a small business, it might offer a full-fledged bookkeeping service. Make sure you integrate these services smoothly with the rest of your content, and that they’re appropriate for the type of visitor that’s going to view that content.

Up to this point I haven’t talked much about SEO, since I’ve been focusing mainly on content guidelines. But if you’re working with an SEO company – or even if you aren’t – I’d like to emphasize one of Fach’s points: “There needs to be an SEO strategy for each page that supports the overall SEO strategy for the entire website!” This is critical. While making sure that all of your content actually works for your visitors is a good first step, you will need an overarching strategy to make everything pay off. That means focusing on keyword research, the structure of your website, promoting your content, adding new content regularly – the whole nine yards. This isn’t easy, but replacing the crappy, pointless content on your website with the kind of information that really serves your visitors is a good start. Good luck! 

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Terri

The post Improve Your Website Content With These Tips appeared first on SEO Chat.

This topic comes up in the SEO Chat forums from time to time; you can read the most recent thread dealing with this question. If you’ve designed your site correctly and managed all of the SEO-related issues properly (title tags, backlinks, content, and more), it should, in theory, be just as easy to rank a basic site as a fancier one. So why would you choose one kind of website design over the other?

One concern might be what you’re selling. Brick-and-mortar stores offer a certain kind of ambiance, in part to give shoppers an impression of what to expect from the goods they sell. You wouldn’t expect a Wal-Mart to display their pots and pans in the same way as a Williams-Sonoma, right?

The same thing may hold true for websites. Darrin Ward, founder of SEO Chat, thinks that this factor plays a role in sales. “My position is that if you’re selling normal non-luxurious goods, such as electronics, hardware, etc. then a more basic design will help conversion rates,” he explained. “If you are selling more luxurious goods or professional services (such as marketing consulting services), then a more flashy/modern design would do better.”

He doesn’t hold this position without some experience to back it up. He notes that “if you look at the numbers and some real stats (conversion rate, bounce rate, time-on-site, etc.),” more basic looking websites perform well, even out-performing flashier, newer-looking websites. Amazon and eBay of course come to mind as excellent examples.

There’s a phenomenon some site owners have noticed: after uploading what they believe is a very improved site design, the bounce rate will sometimes go up and sales may even go down noticeably. One relatively new SEO Chat forum member noted that the important thing to remember is to deliver the website’s message “in the most efficient, accessible, and beautiful way possible.” It could be that the design that looks better, or at least prettier, at first glance is in fact more confusing to your visitor. 

Site owners should also check to see how quickly their website loads with the new design as compared to the old one. No one wants to wait for anything online, so if you can speed up your page loads, you might decrease the number of bounces you get and increase conversions. For example, another fairly new SEO Chat forum member compared two of his websites: an old one that featured a lot of jQuery slide shows and fancy navigation, and a new one that simply included images and text, plain navigation and the like. The older site takes longer to load, but the newer site “gets much more traffic than my old one because all these fancy websites load longer so people tend to get a bit bored waiting…”

Long-time SEO Chat forum member Lb1878 said it best, though: keep it simple. “I think it comes down to personal preference and functionality…If I can find what I’m looking for easily, I’m happy. You should always keep your visitors at the forefront.”

So what should you do if you’re contemplating a site redesign? Lb1878 mentioned that it’s important to do A/B split testing and even use heat maps. “You should always compare the data from the old site to the new idea and see which one pays off. Google does offer some tools for this,” he explained, and added that there is third party software that will allow you to do heat map testing. So there’s no excuse for not collecting data before going live with a newly-redesigned website. Hopefully, doing so will allow you to avoid some costly mistakes. Good luck!

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Terri

The post Plain or Fancy Site Design: Which is Better? appeared first on SEO Chat.

I’m not talking about achieving some kind of Zen-like state, but if you like the idea that you may not need to worry about your rank in Google, you should take a step back from your business and look at it as a whole. What products or services do you offer? Who is your target market? How do they use your products or services? How do your products or services fit into the rest of their lives? And, perhaps most importantly: where do they hang out and relax in a way that they’d be receptive to your message?

Once you answer these questions, you’ll get a better picture of how you can generate leads. That’s important, because it changes the nature of your website and how you use it in your marketing. If most of your lead generation happens when you interact with your target market face to face, for example, your website may function as a glorified brochure with some good additional “evergreen” and relevant content. But you may not have time to blog – and given how you’re using your website, and what you’re doing to generate leads, that’s probably okay.

For some kinds of businesses, it might make a lot of sense to spend some quality time on social websites. Those can be a good adjunct to other marketing approaches – if you pick the right social site, and if you’re not there JUST to market yourself. Think in terms of your customer; what value are you giving them by being on that website?

As an example, Ravelry is a social website for certain kinds of fiber artists. Some local yarn shops maintain groups with forums there as another place for their customers to socialize and to inform them of upcoming events. It’s not that the business doesn’t have its own website – but their customers are more likely to be doing stuff at Ravelry than to visit the yarn shop’s site. Maintaining a presence on the social site reminds customers about the shop – and hopefully they’ll remember it the next time they’re ready to purchase some yarn!

Whatever approach you use, you need to put your website’s URL on nearly everything you send out. It should definitely be on your business cards, stationary, invoices, any business pages on social websites (like the ones that Facebook offers), and so forth. That’s the first and most obvious way to unify your marketing. But there’s more.

Say you’re an ice cream parlor with a Facebook business page in addition to your regular website. You use the Facebook page as your primary means of promotion, and you regularly announce special events there – like the local no-kill shelter bringing some adorable, adoptable animals to your location. You can include a link to your website in this announcement.

If you’re smart, you’ve set up your website link to point visitors directly to a landing page with more information about the event. You shouldn’t make this link point to your home page…unless you’ve changed your home page to include information about the event. That unifies your marketing initiatives, and helps to keep your visitors from getting confused. Remember, users click on links for a reason; if they don’t see any mention of the reason they clicked, they may think they’re in the wrong place or get confused. Confusion is a bad feeling, and you do NOT want your visitors to associate it with you or your website.

So don’t think of your SEO as separate from the rest of your marketing. Think of it as one part of a larger whole – a message that will be the same regardless of where your customer sees it. Good luck!

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Terri

The post Tie Your Marketing Initiatives Together appeared first on SEO Chat.

A topic very similar to this came up in the Jackets Only section of the SEO Chat forums. Dr.Marie got the ball rolling. She is working on several sites that cover different parts of the same niche/industry – and someone interested in one of the sites might justifiably be interested in all of them to some degree. The sites are geared to those looking to buy or sell a home; they include a real estate site, home staging site, home cleaners site and moving business.

She made contact with a local business that wanted to exchange links with the moving business website. She thought they might be interested in exchanging links with the other sites as well, and wondered about the best way to go about it. She also expressed some concerns that Google might see this as some kind of linking network.

Some suggested that the best way to work the links into the respective sites would be as part of some kind of blog post, as that would add value to the site on which the post appeared. It would certainly be better than putting the link up on a dedicated links page. One poster even suggested the possibility of guest blog posts, if the local business site maintained a blog.

As to the appearance of a link network, respected long-time SEO Chat member fathom noted that “The problem isn’t the link…it’s the pattern that you create from doing the same thing over & over again.” According to fathom, Google can tell the difference when “you are not creating a resource for your patrons you are merely creating a link farm…some place out of the way of your real website so you can promote your real website…and that is where PENGUIN nails you.”

So how do you handle this? Take a page out of Matt Cutts’ book, er, blog. He doesn’t write as narrowly as you might think. As fathom points out, “there is no link page on the domain but there are tons of unrelated categories that have nothing to do with Google or SEO (his primary topics) like Halloween, 30 day challenges, music, video, tv, etc.” The key point is that this looks natural because it is done NATURALLY.

It’s all about patterns. Computers and algorithms happen to be very good at spotting patterns. That’s why, as fathom explained, the moment you start trying to think of doing something in quantity, especially large quantities, you’re going to run into trouble. This moved one commenter to note that, for example, a few reciprocal links might be all right, but a link strategy that revolves around them will fail. You need to maintain a varied approach.

What are some of the ways you’ve successfully built links to your websites? Feel free to share in the comments and join the conversations in the SEO Chat community.

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Terri

The post Building Links for Multiple Sites appeared first on SEO Chat.

If you’ve missed the previous parts and would like to check them out, you can review what I wrote about Twitter apps, Facebook apps and games, URL shorteners and certain kinds of social platforms, and sites that help you tell a story, monitor your social analytics, and reach out to users willing to spread your message. For further reference, here’s a link to the amazing (and mind-boggling) infographic put up by Business Insider that shows no fewer than 28 different categories of social media marketing. Just in case you’re keeping score, I’ve covered nine of these in the previous articles, and hope to cover three more in this one.

So let’s discuss social marketing management. There are a TON of companies in this space. This category also includes social publishing platforms and social promotion platforms. Businesses offering these services include Shoutlet, Hootsuite, and Fanzila. Many of these are free services, at least at base; often, you can purchase an upgrade. Often, the free version will be enough to suit your needs. If you’re getting into social media marketing in a really big way, or if you run a large enterprise, the upgrade can be worth the relatively nominal investment. Hootsuite’s basic version offers some amazing functionality, for instance, and its Pro version is only about $10 a month.

They’re similar to stream platforms in that they let you schedule your posts in social media, but they have a lot more features. They let you engage across a lot more social networks, and include capabilities that make your life a lot easier. For example, Hootsuite has a built-in URL shortener.

Social marketing management suites often provide a dashboard-like interface through which you can publish to just about any social network on which you maintain a profile – that’s right, you can manage multiple social profiles with these suites, all from one place. You can also engage and interact with people commenting on your posts through the dashboard. Best of all, they include built-in analytics functions so you can monitor your social media campaigns and collect data to help you understand your ROI. You can even generate reports. A number of the professional SEOs I know who specialize in social media marketing use social marketing management dashboards; once you get to a certain point, it’s difficult to keep track of your campaigns otherwise.

Let’s move on now to the topic of social advertising platforms. These include companies such as GraphEffect, Nanigans, and Efficient Frontier, recently renamed to Multi-Channel Advertising Technology. As you would expect for anything with the word “advertising” in it, these companies provide software and services for which you’ll pay real money. They cater to organizations engaged in social media marketing on a large scale.

If social marketing management companies offer the dashboard on which you can manage your own social media campaigns, social advertising platforms offer the software and the people who know how to use it for you. To give you an idea, when Efficient Frontier was purchased by Adobe, it was described by Mashable as “a company best known for helping marketers negotiate advertising on Facebook and buy search advertising.” Social advertising platforms are used by marketers with large-scale needs.

Finally, let’s discuss social ad networks. Don’t confuse these with social advertising platforms. Social ad networks include companies like RadiumOne, LifeStreet Media, and Media6Degrees. These companies provide somewhat diverse services.

For example, LifeStreet Media makes an in-app advertising solution for mobile and Facebook apps. In other words, if you’ve made an app, LifeStream helps you get it to your target audience and improve the rate at which it’s downloaded. It also offers ads within apps. As you’d expect, this is a paid service.

That’s all I have room for today. Next week, we’ll take a look at some categories of social media marketing involved in the collection of social data, and how those can help you.

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Terri

The post Social Media Marketing: Manage Your Ads appeared first on SEO Chat.

If you’ve missed previous parts, you can check out what I said about Twitter apps, Facebook games and apps, and more. As I’ve noted previously, a Business Insider infographic revealed 28 different social media marketing areas; in this series, I’ve been trying to explain what they are and how you can use them to promote your brand and your company. It isn’t just about Facebook and Twitter after all!

The first topic I’d like to discuss in this article is content curation sites. Examples of these include BuzzFeed, Storify, SkyGrid, and more. These companies let you bring content together in interesting ways to get your message across. Usually, you can pull items you’ve found from a variety of places into one one spot, make comments on it, connect everything together, have subscribers, and so forth.

For example, a Storify page from the Washington Post shows one of their stories, but also includes links to related stories, more items from Washington Post (possibly from other sites, like Twitter tweets), and comments from users. Because of the way Storify is set up, however, the Washington Post was able to tell the story – about users turning to Facebook to get news concerning a Twitter outage – in an unusual way. The publisher pulled the comments from Facebook and Twitter users and posted them directly into the page; this allowed them to follow one of the most important maxims of storytelling: “show, don’t tell.” A fun example from BuzzFeed also illustrates this point.

The challenge here is that you need to have something meaningful to say, and know how to pull it all together in a way that will entertain your readers. These pages have a “man on the street” interview quality to them; if you know how to search for tweets and comments on social sites covering particular topics, that’s half the battle. Make it relevant, make it entertaining – and as with any social media, you need to do it regularly to develop a following. You’ll need to study the content curation site you’re thinking of using, too, to make sure you can fit your pages for them into their categories. If you can make this work, your readers and subscribers on these sites can share your pages on their favorite social media, thus raising your visibility.

Next, I’d like to discuss analytics sites. These include Omniture, mixpanel, bluefin, webtrends, and more. If you’ve ever used analytics to measure the popularity of your website and web pages, you probably have some understanding of how these services work. But these specifically focus on how social media impacts your website. Omniture notes that its product “enables marketers to directly measure their social media efforts, and understand how conversations on social networks and online communities influence marketing performance.” The key point is that these services let you MEASURE your efforts, so you can see how you’re doing.

The exact mix of services that each of these companies, and others in the same space, differs tremendously. Many of them offer free demos or trials, however, and it’s worth taking advantage of these to see if their product gives you the kind of actionable data that you can use.

Finally, I’m going to talk about the area of social brand engagement. Companies that represent this area include Adly, SocialVibe, and MyLikes. These sites offer an intriguing service: they match social media influencers (such as celebrities) up with brands looking for someone to promote them. Not all of them operate in this way. SocialVibe, for instance, “enables advertisers to engage with consumers when they are most motivated to interact with a brand experience, such as while playing a game or seeking access to premium content.” MyLikes bluntly says on its home page that it pays Twitter, YouTube, and Tumblr users to promote stuff they like.

Social brand engagement, in other words, is kind of like getting paid word-of-mouth advertising, with a paid middleman to match you up with the right people. Is this just like paying for links? You can let your own conscience be your guide here, but there’s certainly a fair bit of gray area.

Remember that Google considers paid links to be black hat if you bought them for the purpose of raising your ranking in the search engine. If you purchased a link on a website simply because that website has greater visibility with your target audience than you do, however, and you’re hoping to get traffic from that, technically you’re not in violation of Google’s Terms of Service. If you use this kind of social media marketing, you’re arguably doing the same thing; you’re not (directly) trying to increase your ranking in Google, you’re trying to increase your visibility in social media and get your brand in front of your target audience.

That’s all I have room for today. We’ll continue to cover this next week.

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Terri

The post Social Media Marketing: Managing Your Engagement appeared first on SEO Chat.

In previous articles, I’ve touched on Twitter apps and Facebook apps and games. In this article, we’re going to move a bit beyond these two social giants. While some of the items I’ll discuss will be best known for their use on these networks, you can use them elsewhere as well.

The most obvious of these is URL shorteners. If you’re typing on a site that limits the character count of your posts (such as Twitter), these can come in very handy. The best known of these is bit.ly; you can create a free account or just shorten a URL as a one-off. Tinyurl serves the same function. The latter site notes that long URLs can break in email, forcing the recipient to cut and paste it back together. You might want to use shorter URLs in certain advertising to avoid such problems. It’s worth noting that some social media control panels (again, I’m getting ahead of myself) include URL shorteners as one of their features.

Use URL shorteners with caution, however; some people are wary of shortened URLs because they can’t tell exactly where they’re going. Indeed, some malicious hackers have baited users to click on shortened URLs, making the users vulnerable to attack.

Next is a group described as stream platforms. These include UberMedia, TweetDeck, twhirl and AOL Lifestream. All of these are designed to help users manage their social media streams and feeds. They can help users find posts of interest and schedule their own posts. While most of the ones I’ve listed focus on Twitter, AOL Lifestream covers multiple social networks, and UberMedia has been expanding beyond its Twitter roots. Stream platforms offer multiple tools to help you get a lot done from one place, whether it’s your desktop machine, laptop, netbook, or mobile device. Many include alerts,  filters, various ways to customize and monitor your feeds, and more.

At this point, I imagine it’s pretty obvious how using a stream platform can help you manage your social media marketing. Isn’t it simpler to conduct your interactions from one place, even if you’re using multiple social sites? Just make sure the stream platform you choose covers the sites in which you’re most interested.

I only have room to cover one more social media marketing item in this post, so let’s go with social commerce platforms. Examples include Payvment, Moontoast, Shop Tab, Dotbox, and Vendor Shop, but to be honest, Business Insider’s infographic on social media marketing includes more of these than I can ever list.

So what, exactly, is a social commerce platform? Judging from these companies, it’s a way for businesses to reach out to their fans and customers and reward their loyalty – and the fans, in turn, can help promote the business. It’s not just loyalty deals, though; these companies will help you set up your shop on Facebook, monitor your social analytics, create special deals and one-of-a-kind offers directly to your fans, create engaging polls, and a whole lot more. A social commerce platform could get you engaging your fans and customers socially in ways you haven’t even imagined yet.

A word of warning, though: I know I said that we were going to move beyond Facebook and Twitter in this post, but it looks like most of these services focus specifically on Facebook. They may be great if that’s where you want to go to promote your business – and there’s nothing wrong with that – but if you have a wider strategy in mind, make sure you ask the right questions as to what they can and can’t do. Given how complicated social media marketing has gotten, however, it may be too much to ask to be able to use any one solution to cover everything.

That’s all I have for your this week. Next week, we’ll cover several more areas of social media marketing and SMM services. Have you found one that worked particularly well for you? Share it in the comments!

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Terri

The post Social Media Marketing: Beyond Twitter and Facebook appeared first on SEO Chat.

If you want, you can take a minute to review last week’s article or check out the Business Insider infographic that pulls everything together in one image. I can easily see why many firms turn their online marketing over to outside companies. Can you imagine trying to navigate through all that without a road map, when all you really want to do is focus on your customers and the products and services you provide?

These days, though, SEOs must understand social media marketing. So let’s look at some of the categories displayed in the image I referenced. Last week I discussed Twitter apps: what they are, how they’re used, and how you can use them in your marketing campaigns. This week, we’re moving on to Facebook.

I’m going to assume you know how to set up a Facebook page and have some idea of how to use it to promote a business. Here we’re going to look at two other Facebook categories: Facebook games and Facebook apps.

Practically everyone has played a game on Facebook. We all know about Zynga, who brought us that annoying (and to some, addicting) farming game along with many others, but there’s also Playfish, Playdom, Socialpoint, PopCap, and more. These companies often boast sites of their own at which you can play free versions of their games, purchase games, and even socialize with others playing the same games. Free versions may be casual games you can play in your browser, and often include some kind of advertisement, either a static picture, animation, or in some cases a full-on video, between levels.

If you’re thinking of advertising within a Facebook-style game, do the same kind of cost-benefits analysis you’d do anywhere else. You have a somewhat voluntary audience, as anyone who’s playing a free game knows they have to pay for it somehow, and watching an ad is usually relatively painless. Make sure the game’s demographic and your target audience are a good match.

Now let’s take a look at Facebook apps. The number of these is mind-staggering, even if you ignore the games. There are lots of quizzes; some newspapers boast Facebook apps that make it easier for users to post links to their articles; and apps for many other purposes. Zoosk is a dating site with a Facebook app. Booshaka specifically helps you market on Facebook by showing you who your top fans are; the company asl boasts a search engine to show what’s trending on the social network. BranchOut lets users do career networking on Facebook. Likester bills itself as a global popularity engine; “When you sign up with Likester, you contribute your anonymous data (what you like), in exchange for seeing what everyone else likes,” the site explains. And I’ve hardly exhausted the universe of Facebook apps!

So which Facebook apps should you use? Should you consider creating your own, or hiring someone to create something appropriate? That depends very much on what kind of business you operate, and partly on how you currently market it. If you’re a business professional, you might consider using BranchOut (and you should probably be on LinkedIn, but I’m getting ahead of myself). If you’re a publisher, you might consider some kind of application that makes it easy to not just “like” your pages and articles, but share them. If you do a lot of Facebook promotion, you might take a close look at Booshaka. Likester sounds like a potentially very good source of marketing data.

That’s all I have room for today. Next week, we’ll move beyond Facebook and Twitter to other social media categories. It’s not going to get any easier; as with anything, you’ll have to think about what you’re trying to accomplish before you spend any money. But with this tour, I hope I can give you a taste of what’s possible, and you’ll be moved to investigate more deeply on your own. Good luck!

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Terri

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