----------------------------------------------------------------- I-Search Discussion List "Social Search Marketing and Technology" ----------------------------------------------------------------- Moderator: Published by: Disa Johnson Search Return http://www.searchreturn.com ----------------------------------------------------------------- February 07, 2013 I-Search #156 ----------------------------------------------------------------- SEND POSTS: ----------------------------------------------------------------- Refer a friend: http://www.searchreturn.com/subscribe.shtml ----------------------------------------------------------------- .....IN THIS DIGEST..... // -- CONTINUING DISCUSSION -- // "Social Search Optimization" ~ Mary Mac ~ WebmasterRadio ----------------------------------------------------------------- // -- CONTINUING DISCUSSION -- // ----------------------------------------------------------------- ==> Social Search Optimization From: I-Search <> Discussion: What particular skills and or tech from traditional SEO do you find most useful for your social (search) marketing? Author tags get applied. Fun tips are appreciated! Mary Mac Yes to hashtags! Also, target your comments on social media the same way you target content on a landing page. Do not try to appeal to the world. Instead, post information that pertains to the search interests of known buying personas for your product or service. And use keywords that are used in typical searches by your targeted buyers. That is the technique I use to build a global community, without even promoting a company. If you are promoting a company, you can get much better results. To see how I do it, see https://twitter.com/bestwebstrategy ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- // -- CONTINUING DISCUSSION -- // ----------------------------------------------------------------- ==> Social Search Optimization From: I-Search <> Discussion: What particular skills and or tech from traditional SEO do you find most useful for your social (search) marketing? Author tags get applied. Fun tips are appreciated! Thanks to Ross Dunn and John Carcutt, additional discussion appears in this week's Webmaster Radio 101 episode, 17 mins in. Tune in to the show for more. Partial transcript: Ross: The first thing I think of is how is this going to affect my overall link profile, social credibility profile, all that kind of thing. I'm always thinking about how things connect and wether or not is on the same topic and theme. I always try to think in terms of continuity. That's my first thought. Mostly it's superstition. Because none of it has been proven. I always think about continuity that what I always talk about will somehow benefit when all the signals start to make a difference. John: When you think about targeting and building authority on a certain topic on your website which is what you want to do from an SEO standpoint, when you want to build authority on a certain topic you want to take that same topical relevancy and have it translate to your social presence as well. So when those social signals really start impacting from a search perspective, there's continuity between your targeting on your site and your targeting on your social. Ross: I generally think that way. John: That's a great thought. I was thinking about what are some of the skills that you need have as an SEO. You need to be able to do keyword research, you need to know some basic coding skills, you need to be able to dig into analyzing analytics. I think the analytics side of it from a, is really the main point of it is really where I make the connection is between the skill set from an SEO and a skill set from social media marketing, you have to understand the impact of what you're doing. You have to be able to measure. You have to be able to know that 'if I do this, this is the impact in SEO' you have to have that same skill in social media. If I'm making this kinda move in social being able to look at those analytics, look at those metrics, and seeing what kind of impact it's having. I think that's a good skill that carries across both of those mediums. Ross: Even the fact that you know that whatever you do online has impact. In this case it's social media that's amplified. John: It's really interesting. I've had conversations with people, you remember years ago when we started people said you can't measure it, SEO is like this black box, you can do all this work and you're not really sure if you're having any impact on any of it. Well that's changed a lot in the past four of five years there's a lot better ways and more specific ways to measure the impact of SEO on a website and on a business. Well social media right now is in that old-school SEO, where how do you really measure impact of social media, it's not really measurable as far as driving business and ROI, and they're having those same kinda conversations around social media that we used to have around SEO. If some of the learnings we've learned in SEO to make it more measurable and impactful, we're going to be able to apply to social media over time. We're not there yet but we're getting there. Ross: A lot of things about proving wether or not what you're doing is having any impact. When it comes right down to it, there are ways. And analytics has been the root for it. In social media or even link building it's far more difficult. Social media will ultimately at some point but link building has been around for a while and they really don't have any good examples of that either. John: It is interesting that just this last week Facebook announced the ability able to tag your webpages with a Facebook tag that will pull back information into the Facebook analytics that comes directly from your site, so you'll be able to track your conversions on your website from your Facebook advertising traffic. So they're working on it. It's coming out. It's happening. It will just take some time. Ross: And that's just one social media site. I got an email from a reseller that a competitor is doing some web marketing for the client, and we're doing some. You gotta love it when there's two. We're doing it from a point of largess posting, and high quality stuff; really really well-written. You can tell I'm proud of it; good writer. The thing is, they're saying that they're the reason for all the results. They've got a bigger budget, so they put everything out in the most beautiful reports and they're spending a lot of time to make this client believe them versus us. The fact of the matter is, they're getting an increase in traffic and it's non-branded terms etc. There is no way to prove which content it is. Unless it's direct traffic, all they know is non- branded terms have increased. It's all about how you spin it. That's why I find this field lately a little bit soul grinding. I don't like to spin things. Its difficult with link building because, like social as well, is it truly you and I have to be honest and say I don't know. All I know is that what I'm doing is good quality and people like it. John: That's part of the problem. Especially with social when things get shared so frequently. All of a sudden content you may have created for a client gets shared by a friend of a friend, who then has another friend and you actually get a conversion through. There's no way to track that right now. The cross channel tracking if somebody emails a link of a Facebook post that you did, who knows at this point from social because it is so much of a shared medium tracking it from person to person is so difficult if not impossible at this point. You're right. It's the same discussions it's the same arguments we've had SEO is very hard to track. The technology will show up eventually but it's just not there yet. Ross: Do you find that it's not quite as fun as it used to be? Like in SEO I could really prove it. Back in the day, rankings improved, I was the only one doing it. These days there are so many different channels, the person's doing all those channels at once; it's very difficult to prove it. Even with all our technology, even with analytics etc. because what we're talking about is an algorithm, that we're trying to influence based on good content based on truly relevant information, technically it's still influencing it. John: It kinda goes back to the old school, there's an old advertising saying I know that 50% of my advertising works, I just don't know which 50%. It's kinda the same with social. Right now we know we have to do this, we know it has an impact even when we don't know which individual pieces are having that impact. I love it, actually. I love trying to figure this stuff out. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Stay Tuned. Got feedback?: http://www.searchreturn.com/feedback.shtml Archives: http://www.searchreturn.com/digest-archive.shtml Alternate formats: http://www.searchreturn.com/info-formats.shtml Manage Subscriptions: http://www.searchreturn.com/help/manage-subs.shtml Problems unsubscribing? 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