a presentation on linking and social media strategy for econmic development organizations

1. Economic Development: Link & Social Media Strategy

2. Need a plan? You’ve spent considerable effort and money on your websites and now you’re caught up in the Social Media craze with accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and not to mention your blogs. Are you using them to compliment each other?

3. Page Competition 2008 2000 1998 Source : “We knew the web was big” by Google, 2008 http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html Graphics from Webmarketing 123. Google Pages

4. Hard Fact The pages searchers click on Source: “iProspect Blended Search Results Study” by JupiterResearch, 2008, http://www.iprospect.com/about/researchstudy_2008_blendedsearchresults.htm Graphics from Webmarketing 123.

5. Why do Links matter? Links are Internet currency

6. Position Matters The percent of clicks continues to drop Source: leaked AOL data

7. Types of Links Inbound or One-way – These are the best Outbound – Helping visitors find relevant information Reciprocal – Possible to do more harm than good

8. Key Factors for Inbound Links #1 – Quality of the inbound link #2 – Relevance to the content on the inbound link #3 – Anchor keywords on the inbound link page #4 – Title keywords on the inbound link page #5 – Number of links (quantity)

9. What do people Link to? Content – relevant, trust, interesting or evokes an emotion (for or against) People or Organizations they know People or Organizations they like

10. Link Sources Bookmarking – Furl, De.licio.us., StumbleUpon Blog Comments Article Marketing Press Release Marketing Contextual Blog Posts Videos – YouTube, Viddler Directories Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn

11. Social Media Marketing Major social media sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter don’t provide a benefit in terms of search engine results. But these outlets can be a tremendous source for driving traffic to your website and should not be ignored.

12. Social Media with Link Value LinkedIn Digg Technorati MyBlogLog Kirtsy Propeller CoRank

13. Social Media Outlets

14. Social Media – Your next task If the website supports foreign languages, you travel internationally for business recruitment or the organization has an international office you might want to consider internationalizing your social media efforts.

15. Social Media: What the World Uses

16. Social Media: The Big 3 Sources: chart http://www.vincos.it/world-map-of-social-networks Data based on Alexa & Google Trends for Website results:

17. A Few Linking Do’s and Don’ts All links should not go directly to your homepage Link to specific pages on your site (relevancy from inbound page) Quality over Quantity Don’t ignore .gov and .edu links Check for do-follow or no-follow tags for Social Media sites Don’t be afraid to terminate or revive a link

18. Linking & Media Summary Content is still KING !! Never ever buy a link for page rank ! Building and implementing a Linking strategy takes time. Page rank of the site Linking to affects your rank. Website and Social Media efforts should work together to create greater value. Use social media to position yourself internationally.