4 vital search strategies for social media marketers
Take a look at the following charts and graphs.
Popular social media expert:
Well known social media company:
Social media and marketing media outlet:
Notice something? All of the sites that strongly rely on social media (50% or more of their traffic) have gotten pantsed over the past year in terms of traffic. Why?
It’s gotten so noisy in social media that the predominant way most of us are going to be found and discovered these days en masse isn’t through social media. It’s going to be through search. In looking at these accounts, their search volume has gotten stagnant or has declined!
With that in mind, here’s a simple but not easy question: how carefully are your search and social activities tied together?
After all, search has changed dramatically in the past few years, and many people are using old rulesets in their heads when it comes to SEO. Let’s see how up to date you are:
How important is on-site optimization?
Once upon a time, keyword stuffing, bolding text, and precise link text on each page mattered a great deal. Those days are gone. Today, the few things left that matter are:
- Appropriately named page and post titles
- Awesome content that is shared
- Fresh content
- A regularly updated XML sitemap
Let’s be very clear about the demands being asked of you as a content producer: you must have awesome content, created frequently, shared often. This is a tall, tall demand, but if you want to be found, if you want to be shared, if you want to be known, you have to hit these goals. Awesome content that’s infrequent won’t win you the game any more – the freshness update penalizes you. Mediocre content or repurposed content won’t win you the game any more – the Panda updates penalize you for that. Content that isn’t shared penalizes you, thanks to social signals in rankings.
What matters in off-site optimization?
Once upon a time, building links as fast, furiously, and far as possible was the sole way to win the off-site optimization game. Nothing else mattered except links, links, links, and you could get them any way you could. Today, that game has changed, too. If you haven’t read the SEOMoz 2011 Ranking Factors study, you missed the boat:
- Relevance matters
- Pay to play is getting tougher
- Social sharing matters a great deal
- User behavior matters
- … all that said, more links are still generally better than fewer links
As a social media marketer, you have a great deal of opportunity to nail all of the criteria search engines consider important to a site showing up. If you’re cultivating a focused audience in social, getting them to do things that matter (share, link up, click on relevant search results, etc.) should be easier than the average marketer working with very little, but we’re not putting our resources together.
For example, the social media expert listed above has over 300 recent tweets, but only one of them references their site or a post they’ve written recently. I’m all for conversation and community, but throw yourself a bone every now and again, buddy. Your search viability is counting on it, and with as many fans/followers/friends as you have, getting powerful search signals out of the audience should be relatively trivial and would reverse that slow decline in your site’s traffic.
What should you be doing?
Here’s your recipe card, if you’re looking for the quick answer, the TL;DR:
1. You must create awesome content. Sorry. There’s no getting around this. If your content sucks, then you need to level up your content creation skills. Go read Content Rules by CC Chapman and Ann Handley if you need help on this front.
2. You must publish awesome content frequently. How often? Google is starting to report freshness results in hours and minutes, not days and weeks. Get a plugin like Editorial Calendar for WordPress to help keep you on track.
3. You must have a structurally sound website using XML sitemaps properly and doing title-based on-site SEO. Your content should be appropriately titled for words and phrases that other human beings might actually search for. Test out your blog titles or parts of titles in the Google Adwords keyword tool if it’s a really important post. You should be publishing content on a blog that has a syntactically correct RSS feed, ideally routed through Google’s Feedburner service.
4. You must get people to do things with your content. Share it, link to it, retweet it, post it on Google+, hit the +1 button – anything and everything you can do to demonstrate that other human beings find value in your content. That’s one of the reasons I switched my newsletter to weekly, to get more people back to my content, sharing it, and doing stuff with it.
Is this recipe card complete? No. There are plenty of little things that happen after this, but if you don’t get these 4 steps right, you’re totally hosed, so focus on them first. This is the foundation of what I do, and I think it’s working:
That’s not a boast. That’s an exhortation for you to go and do likewise. You have the recipe. You have the tools. Get to it.
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If you’re going to start with the Christmas music already…
… may as well be the good stuff. One of my favorites, Sarah McLachlan’s Wintersong:
Happy wintertime, everyone.
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Google Reader and the loss of serendipity
One of the most critical losses to the blog reading community with the rollout of the new Google Reader is the loss of its internal sharing, something that many of us came to rely on for serendipity. Why? Because in many cases, other people in our Google Reader network found new blogs, new items to share, new and interesting perspectives through what our friends shared. With Reader’s new changes pushing everything to G+, it’s mighty hard now to see what your friends thought was important in the blogs they read daily.
Let’s take a brief moment to talk about the power of serendipity. Serendipity is loosely defined as finding something that you did not expect to find, a happy accident, and a pleasant surprise. Serendipity is more than just an accident, however – it’s a related accident. Here’s a good example: when you’re at the library, browsing at the shelf, trying to find the book you were looking for, you notice that there’s a series of books on either side of it that are even better than what you’d come looking for. That’s serendipity. Another simple example: you go to a conference to hear a popular speaker and wind up standing at the lunch line right next to them. Serendipity is sort of an accidental upgrade of your circumstances.
That’s what made Google Reader such a powerful engine of serendipity. You weren’t just finding random blog posts on random things. You were finding things that other people who you followed for a reason were finding, and it was all related.
So what do you do if you still want your daily dose of serendipity? On the consuming side, you’ll want to check out the topical categories at sites like Topsy and Alltop. Both of these provide you with some level of discovery, some level of serendipity. I’ve started using the Alltop marketing feed in Flipboard as a way to randomly find related items, and it’s better than nothing.
On the publishing side, you’ve got a few options if you want to help encourage serendipity. On Twitter, I publish a feed every morning of the top 5 items that I thought were worth paying attention to called #the5. You can monitor this simply by searching for #the5 in Twitter search. I also publish a weekly newsletter that you can subscribe to which will round up and wrap up the week’s #the5 entries. You can also save and share items in Instapaper as well, and then permit Facebook, Twitter, or email followers to find your shared items that way.
Most of all? Share a blog you’re reading every week with your friends, by whatever your preferred sharing method is, but tell a friend about a blog you’re reading that you think they might not be (but should be). Your friends will get to know you, you’ll be fostering serendipity, and who knows? They might share something back that will change your morning reading list forever.
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An interview with Don F. Perkins on ZMOT
I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Don F. Perkins from Mind Mulch about a few different things on my mind of late, such as Google’s Zero Moment of Truth. Watch the short 5 minute interview below to see what we chatted about.
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Between the long tail and the best time
Marketing appears to be somewhat amusingly stuck between two extremes today. On the one hand, you have the folks (especially on the ecommerce and SEO side) saying that the long tail is your friend and is all you need to prosper. Create enough good content and the long tail will take care of you. On the other hand, you have the short attention span crowd looking for the best time to tweet, blog, email, send press releases, make coffee, and eat lunch. Do something at exactly the right time and you can take the rest of the week off is the promise of the “best time to…” crowd.
Both points of view are looking for the same thing: the easy answer, the magic wand, the simple trick that lets them not have to think, that lets them not have to do the work. Bad news: doing the work is the only way to make any of this marketing stuff work for you, period.
Do these viewpoints have any validity? Sort of. Reality is somewhere in the middle, but there are ways to determine whether your audience responds more towards focused, timed activities or steady publishing activities. How could you tell? Fairly simply (remember simple is not easy), but we have to get super-mathy with a spreadsheet.
Step 1: Let’s gather your data. Whether it’s web page traffic, email opens/clicks, Twitter retweets, Bit.ly clickthroughs, Facebook insights – whatever it is that you want to make a timing and production decision on, gather up your data. Try to aim for a single campaign of some kind to give you an isolated data set to work with, such as your most recent newsletter, a PPC ad campaign, a Facebook promotion, etc. Ideally aim for a period of at least 7 days, if not longer.
In this example, I’m going to use data from my personal newsletter.
Step 2. Arrange your data in a spreadsheet over time. Here I’ve grouped up my open rates by day, then transformed them into a graph, charting cumulative frequency of opens. If I were to make a chart of my data, it would look something like this:
This is what is known as a Pareto curve, or powerlaw curve.
At this point, the non-mathematician would flip open their copy of The Long Tail book, compare it to the charts in the book, and say, wow, this is a long tail situation! Clearly the whole “best time to send” is bunk. The more math inclined say, “let’s look at this a different way.”
Step 3. Change the vertical axis of your data to a logarithmic scale. Your spreadsheet software should let you do this fairly easily. This should have the effect of transforming that powerlaw curve into more or less a straight line.
That’s fairly close to a flat horizontal line. This means that the majority of the action happens at the beginning of the newsletter and then trickles off to nothing very quickly.
For contrast, here’s what a cumulative percentage chart in log scale would look like for a data set that increased by 5% each day – what you would expect of content that garnered slow and steady attention:
It’s closer to a 45 degree line than a flat line.
And for good measure, here’s the extreme of “best time to tweet” where 99% of the action happens instantly and then nothing afterwards:
What does all this signify? Simple: the closer your logarithmic-scale Pareto curve is to a flat line, the more you should investigate the timing aspect of your marketing, because your content has a very short shelf life of attention. You will want to do things like test when the best time to tweet is, because your audience reacts very quickly and loses interest just as quickly.
The closer your logarithmic-scale Pareto curve is to a 45 degree angle, the more you should ignore “best time” things and look at how you can produce content on a regular basis, at regular intervals, to keep a consistent flow of attention to your marketing.
Here’s the good news: you can chart all of this data yourself, using nothing more than a spreadsheet and the data exports from the tools you already have. You need not pay any money to any expensive marketing company or social media expert to find out how quickly or slowly you lose attention, and can base your strategy on what you find out of nothing more than a simple spreadsheet:
The table used to make the graphs above.
I would strongly encourage you, before you start to develop an emotional attachment to either of the two extremes, to chart your own data and find out how your audience is actually behaving, then make a strategic decision afterward.
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