AWS Community Day CPH - Three problems of Terraform
Social Media and Google + 2012
1. Social media and Google+ 2012
@FreshEgg
@PaulChaloner
#FreshEgg
#SearchLondon
2. What will the presentation include?
• What does social media really drive?
• The increasing influence of social search
• Google+ recent changes (+/-)
• Google Local & other updates
• Practical takeaways
3. What does social media help drive?
An introduction to the core drivers
4. What can great social media drive?
• Likes, fans, follows, friends, shares, recommendations
• Website traffic
• Revenue, turnover, profit
• Improved ranking positions in search engines
• Exceptional customer service
• Reputation
• User generated content
• Greater brand awareness
• A diverse and natural looking link profile
• Improved products and services
6. Social search changes
Over the last 14 months, the search landscape has changed
dramatically. Social media is not only an important part of a search
campaign, but is now ESSENTIAL for success.
Some of the changes include:
• Google+ and its estimated 400million users
• Influence on rankings
• Natural link profiles
• Additional traffic
7. What is replacing/adding to link factors?
• Dave Coplin (Head of search at Bing) says: “Be bloody good at
social”
• Both Google and Bing have admitted that the amount of followers
you have in social media is part of the algorithm, but its about
much more than just followers.
• Speed of sharing
• Reach of sharing
• Freshness of content
• Unique, quality, relevant content
• Pierre Farr (Google) says “social sharing will happen naturally if
you create good content”
8. Social media considerations
• Use the right tools to measure & monitor
• One good idea is sometimes all it takes
• Plan & prepare
• Seeding is exceptionally important
• Integrate everything
• Budget and time
• Customer expectation has exploded
• If customers contact you on a digital format, respond digitally!
• Only use the most appropriate platforms
• Fully utilise social search
15. Google+ local
• It’s very broken
• Zagat is now important (meaning reviews are)
• Multiple systems for some businesses
• Double listings are common
• Controlling your page is semi broken
• Dashboard still in place for “places”
• Business pages stay independent
• No punchD - yet
17. Plus or minus?
• Undoubted social influence on SERPS
• Authorship increasing CTR
• Impossible for companies to ignore due to SEO benefits
• Multi site integration (YouTube, gmail, plus all sync up)
• Logged in search reduces SEO reliance, but increases social
• iOS updates have made voice activated local a great opportunity
• 400 million users by year end, make it the 3rd largest platform in
the world.
• Check-ins and reviews are now even more important to your local
listing
• 13-18 year olds now allowed on Google+ (restricted)
18. Plus or minus?
• 3.3 minutes average site usage in the whole of January
• Poor adoption in the UK, despite advertising on TV
• Reluctance of users to switch from Facebook or use more than
one/two platforms
• Games
• The family & friend issue
• Demographics
• Tumbleweed+
• Logged in search reduces SEO benefit
• Local is a real mess right now
20. Some social sweet spots
• Be creative but realistic
• Plan
• Set goals & objectives
• You can never have enough social media seeding
• Engage with high profile, well followed, respected users
• Piggy back other campaigns or trends
• Measure the success
• Review the campaign to learn for next time
• Integrate & sync everything! Social media touches everything!
• Don’t ignore Google+ (even if it is a bit pants)
21. Google+ takeaways
• Optimise brand pages
• Post regular and often
• Engage, interact, respond
• Link your G+ page to your website
• Implement REL=Author for improved CTR
• Make sure local is completed and linked
• If appropriate, prompt for reviews on Zagat in store
• Hold a hangout once a month
• Share other content, not just your own
• Claim your URL!
22. And finally…
FARQ
Freshness
Amplification
Relevancy
Quality
Video to start: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goYgoxCyKFgThe original has 52.6million viewsThe outtakes has less than 15,000
There are lots more things social media can drive, but for me these are the most critical and the most important. We’ll show you how to drive some of these in this presentation, but we’d need a few weeks to cover it all!First of all lets look at three very distinctly different case studies.
Talk about the bridge being social search.
Use the right tools to measure, monitor and market (we will come back to this in a moment)- One good idea is sometimes all it takes- A great idea can often fail due to lack of planning and preparation- Seeding is exceptionally important (We’ll look at seeding in a bit more depth in a moment)- Social media is not the ONLY thing that matters and it isnt the magic bullet - Social takes investment in time and money but can pay off long term (also consider social media as part of any marketing and advertising budgeting)- Customer expectation has exploded – it is no longer enough simply to have a social media presence, customers EXPECT service from it. (we’ll take a closer look at this in a moment too)- If customers contact you on a digital format, respond digitally, dont give them a phone number to call you!- Dont spread your brand too thinly across many platforms, instead concentrate on the ones which make most sense to your business and contain your demographic.Fully utilises social search – see graphic later in this presentation
Talk through the fact most of these are free! Sprout Social costs as little as $59 a month. Facebook insights are the most powerful, yet under-utilised set of reports out there for Facebook. Sprout is great for tracking followers and fans increments. Klout needs to be used with caution – great for a general idea of direction and the matrix influence is very good, but take the overall score with a pinch of salt. GA is excellent and getting better all the time with multi channel funnels now enabling you to see the touch points of social. Social mention is free and great for a very simple monitoring tool, but there are others out there (like Argyle or Radian 6) which do the job more thoroughly when you can afford to pay for them.
If you don’t use anything other than your blog, don’t expect anyone to read it (other than those who find it in a search engine).
When you integrate everything though, content reaches places you wouldn’t even have dreamed of before.Point out how useful social media is, but that it is not the magic bullet some might tell you it is. It just doesn’t work without other parts of digital marketing and likewise, they don’t work as well with out social media.
Over the years, social media customer service and expectation has grown at a frenetic pace. Where as once it was fine to even have a page on social media, these days, if you arent responding and engaging all the time, you suck at social! You can even get bad press for failing to talk to someone on social media, regardless of what the original problem was, even if you fixed it!
Creative and realistic – how much resource do you have? Is it achievable?Plan everything! – My wife once told me that I could “be spontaneous, I just needed 3 days to plan to be!”Set goals – SMART targets – what do you really want to achieve? What are your objectives?Seeding, the more you seed, the more it grows.Pick out top 20 users and target them individually – it really pays off alongside seeding. Even if it does take longer.What else is going on? Can you piggy back a successful but lower quality campaign? (talk about FE on the timeline issue with mashable) is something trending you can hook in to? Don’t just look at worldwide trends or national trends, but use whatthetred.com and trendsmap.com to find more niche, local trends or the start of something that might explode.Use the right tools to measure your objectives, if its sales, use GA, if its likes/followers use Sprout. EtcEven if a campaign doesn’t work, record everything, you learn more from a bad campaign than a good one.Remember to use all channels open to you, whether that be PR, offline marketing, TV, radio, social, seo, advertising, billboards, leaflet drops. Sync it all up!
