Social Media Strategy

Before defining any social media strategy, businesses have to understand the consumer who uses these social media tools & their consumption pattern on internet. Also social media strategy is not a onetime investment but rather it’s an ongoing process & it takes time to show results.

Instead of blindly jumping & start using all the social tools available, to reach their customers, businesses should first have a clear plan of engagement in place. In the world of social media content is the king. Consumers are searching & using online media for information that goes beyond price point & product name. Hence content creation plan is of paramount importance to engage users.

1.     Create compelling content that people will share, that people find valuable & interesting.

2.     Have content that educates, gives user more information.

3.     Generate consumer participation. Give them a chance to interact with your brand & create their own content.

4.     Create opportunities to answer questions from your consumers. 

Important Online Cycle for Businesses

Social Media Strategy: Roadmap for Success

1. Goals: - Who & What?

a.     Define audiences & identify influencers as well as long tail communities. Understand sociographics of customers.

                                          i.     Where are your customers online?

                                         ii.    What are your customers’ social behaviors online?

                                        iii.    What social information or people do your customers rely on?

                                        iv.    What is your customers’ social influence? Who trusts them?

                                         v.    How do your customers use social technologies in the context of your products?

b.    Define objectives

c.     Set reasonable expectation

2.     Media:-

a.     Choose social media platforms.

b.    Social media sites & networks.

3.     Engagement: - How to listen, interact & respond?

a.     Content: types of media, voice, frequency

b.    Duties: operational plan for producing, posting, sharing, responding

c.     Policy: addressing negative comments

4.     Reach: - How will you promote your program?

a.     Online, email, offline, PR, word of mouth

b.    How will you build your network?

5.     Resources: - What is needed & what it will cost?

a.     People, process, assets, tools etc.

6.     Metrics: - How will you measure success?

a.     What metrics will you use?

b.    What tools will you use?

c.     How will you translate into ROI?

Why Social Media?

The term “social media” has recently created a lot of buzz in the minds of the business people & consumers alike. Is “social media” really overhyped or can it do a total makeover in the lives of people & businesses around us.

A social network is a social structure that maps out the relationships between individuals. Social networks can be defined as "our connections with other people". You're connected to your friends, who in turn are connected to their friends, and so on.

Social-networking sites "make invisible social networks visible" by allowing us to see (with pictures and links) who our friends are, who our friends' friends are, and who our friends' friends' friends are -- all in an easy-to-use interface.

Social Media for Users - Social Networks as Social Capital 

Social media & social networks are important because they give people social capital. Social capital is the "resources accumulated through the relationships among people". Social capital makes it easier for us to find useful information and increases a community's capacity to organize and achieve goals.

These resources can come in several forms.

§  Useful information: medical tips, driving directions, movie recommendations

§  Personal relationships: family, friends, neighbors, colleagues

§  Ability to organize and form groups: local government, sports teams, knowledge groups

Social Media for Businesses

Most of the businesses today are still in dilemma whether social media is really good for their businesses. Many think that social media is good for only those businesses where clients & customers of that particular business uses social media. “My customers are not gonna look for me on any social media” replied a local automobile service centre owner to me during a casual chat. I tried to explain to him that there is not any service or product which cannot be benefitted from social media.

Any business or service runs on relationships & connections. Customers want to buy products or services from who they know or who they like or who they trust. Any business does all of it by making connections with their customers. And this is what social media do – make connections & gain attention.

So why should businesses be so much focusing on the social media for making these connections & expanding their businesses?

1.    Because social sites are where people spend most of their time. People spend more time on Facebook than on Google or Yahoo. People spend 3x time on facebook than google. Social media now surpasses Email in global reach.

2.    Word of mouth is reaching a new level. It is number influencer of purchases. Millions of interactions take place every hour online. Brands are being discussed 24/7. Does not require huge media budget & viral effect can carry a  message a long way.

3.    You are already involved in social media. Your employees are doing it. Discussions about your brand are taking place. If you participate you can shape outcomes.

4.    Improve search rankings. Social media drives top ranking in Google ranking algorithm.

Some popular Social Media Tools
1.       Social networking
2.       Blogging/Micro Blogging
3.       User generated content
4.       Email marketing
5.       Search marketing
6.       Online video
7.       Mobile marketing
8.       Widgets
9.       Podcasting
10.     RSS
11.     Display ads
12.     Game marketing

Impact of Google Caffeine on SEO Strategy

With the introduction of Caffeine, the job of SEO professionals got a lot harder. The algorithm’s definitely different. It has more reliance on keyword strings to produce better results

With the faster, real time search index of Google picking up information quicker, any good SEO strategy - that includes keyword weighting, fresh content, social bookmarking and other such successful elements – applied to a website would immediately begin to bear fruit in the search rankings. However, any slip up would immediately send the rankings plunging since there would always be competing sites with new and quality content, links from social networking platforms and greater site speed that would be immediately detected by Caffeine and updated to the index.  

Google will now serve Twitter real-time search results in its Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and Facebook updates, thus streaming real-time content from across the web. Google's new search technologies enable it to monitor over a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes daily in conjunction with its partners, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, and Identi.ca.

So some of the tips for successful SEO on Caffeine infrastructure are listed below:-

1.   Publishers should keep their site fresh to be crawled by Caffeine. If your site is not updated regularly you may lose your rankings.

2.   Encourage User generated content. Add social media feeds/blogs to your site if appropriate to provide additional, fresh content & increase user engagement.

3.   Now site speed would play a greater part in Google search engine algorithm. So optimize the code, externalize the style sheets & JavaScript code, use file compression where appropriate, reduce server load & number of requests and avoid redirects.

4.   Include Engagement Objects on key landing pages. Engagement objects are non-text elements on a page which draw attention and elicit user involvement such as images, videos, Flash Objects, audio, maps, news, books, widgets, feeds, interactive games, tables & blog posts. The Google search engine aims to provide a rich & engaging user experience & thus will reward (rank higher) sites that include appropriate Engagement Objects.

5.   Because of the prominence of real-time search content in the results pages, it is now more important than ever for companies to have a social media presence, create new content for relevant social media sites on a regular basis, and optimize that content with SEO best practices.

6.   Linking is very important, so create both internal and external links. Blogs and social media marketing are excellent ways to create natural links to your site, and this type of content is moving up in the Google SERPs. You can cross link to other videos, tweet your video, promote it on your blog, or link to your Facebook page and other relevant social media sites.

7.   Another prominent presence in the SERPs is video links. People seem to click on videos more than other SERP links, and that's why Google is moving video up in the results. When considering video, plan to create content that is worth sharing and of high quality. Optimize with keywords in the video file name, title, tags, and the URL. Create a brief description using optimized text. Create a video launch page, optimizing content for SEO as usual with title, description, tags, optimized content, links, anchor text and XML site map.

Google using Caffeine to stay awake at all times

Google recently announced the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. Google claims that Caffeine will provide 50 percent fresher results for web searches than their last index, and it's the largest collection of web content they've ever offered. This so called next generation Google search engine, “Google 2.0”, is designed specifically to compete with the likes of Bing and Facebook.

But before we discuss that how does this new search engine indexer will going to affect the health of the current users, publishers & power searchers, let me explain what exactly does this search engine indexer does.

Search engine indexing collects, parses, and stores data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. So when one searches Google, he/she is not searching the live web. Instead they are searching Google's index of the web which, like the list in the back of a book, helps one pinpoint exactly the information they need. So all of you, who think that what they see in Google search results shows all the information that exists on web, are totally wrong. In fact it is the information that Google can find through its search engine.

This new indexing method - "Caffeine" is nothing but a more exhaustive and continuous cataloging of the vast web. The earlier web crawling and indexing system was carried out in layers. While the main layer was indexed once in two weeks, the other layers wouldn’t update uniformly. Refreshing a single layer would involve analyzing the web in its entirety. A user searching Google may not get the most recently posted articles, updated pages or Twitter or Facebook conversations, because of the delay between finding the updated pages and indexing them, thereby making it unavailable for users in real time. With Caffeine, Google analyze the web in small portions and update their search index on a continuous basis, globally. As Google find new pages, or new information on existing pages, they add those straight to the index. That means user can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.

Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. Most users won’t notice a difference in search results, but web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences.

This Google update is huge from a search engine optimization and link building standpoint because every time new algorithms and infrastructure changes like this happens, the old SEO techniques are no longer relevant & hence it makes the lives of the current SEO gurus more challenging. In my next post I'll talk more about how SEO can be done for this new infrastructure from Google.

Google: Undisputed King of Disruptive Technology

Recently I came across some really funny lines about Google.

One of them goes like this - “I’ll hit you so hard that you’ll fall in a place where even Google will not be able to find you”

A board outside a church says “Come in, Google doesn't have all the answers!"

All this really pushed me to go back & do a quick Google on “Google”.

Google can undisputedly be considered as one of the most disruptive innovations of 21^st century. Google was founded in 1998 with an initial funding of just $100,000 & in 2004 Google was valued at $23 billion.

The Google web search engine is the company's most popular service which has done wonders for the company.

Very few people know that early in 1999, while still graduate students, Brin and Page (Google founders) decided that the search engine they had developed was taking up too much of their time from academic pursuits. They went to Excite CEO George Bell and offered to sell it to him for $1 million. He rejected the offer, and later threw Vinod Khosla, one of Excite's venture capitalists, out of his office after he had negotiated Brin and Page down to $750,000. Today undoubtedly then Excite CEO must be hitting his head really hard against the wall for letting go the biggest opportunity of his life.

So How does Google Works?? Well you can find millions of web results on Google on this topic. I tried to put all this information in a simple way. Of course, Google search engine is lot more complex but you can get some idea by reading the post below. A simple idea of how complex it is can be made from the fact that the patented PageRank algorithm of Google ranks web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms.

Google search can be divided into three parts:-

1. Googlebot (or spiders) – is a web crawler (a software program) that finds and retrieves pages on the web and hands them off to the Google indexer. Googlebot runs on a distributed network of thousands of low-cost computers and can therefore carry out fast parallel processing. When Googlebot fetches a page, it culls all the links appearing on the page and adds them to a queue for subsequent crawling. By harvesting links from every page it encounters, Googlebot can quickly build a list of links that can cover broad reaches of the web. This technique, known as deep crawling, also allows Googlebot to probe deep within individual sites. Because of their massive scale, deep crawls can reach almost every page in the web. Because the web is vast, this can take some time, so some pages may be crawled only once a month.

2. The indexer - that sorts every word on every page and stores the resulting index of words in a huge database. Googlebot gives the indexer the full text of the pages it finds. These pages are stored in Google’s index database. Google has a complex data structure to store all this information which allows rapid access to documents that contain user query terms. To improve search performance, Google ignores (doesn’t index) common words called stop words (such as the,is, on, or, of, how, why, as well as certain single digits and single letters). Stop words are so common that they do little to narrow a search, and therefore they can safely be discarded.

3. The query processor - This compares your search query to the index and recommends the documents that it considers most relevant. The query processor has several parts, including the user interface (search box), the “engine” that evaluates queries and matches them to relevant documents, and the results formatter.

PageRank is Google’s system for ranking web pages. A page with a higher PageRank is deemed more important and is more likely to be listed above a page with a lower PageRank. Google considers over a hundred factors in computing a PageRank and determining which documents are most relevant to a query, including the popularity of the page, the position and size of the search terms within the page, and the proximity of the search terms to one another on the page.

Indexing the full text of the web allows Google to go beyond simply matching single search terms. Google gives more priority to pages that have search terms near each other and in the same order as the query.