Social Media Marketing Tutorials: Using Social Media for SEO

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Marketing 2.0: The Social Network

Social media marketing is a relatively new term in the world of search engine optimization. This form of marketing involves submitting a site, usually news, pictures or video, to a plethora of other sites, where users can then "vote" whether it was good or not. By uploading your site so others can vote, you can gain unique pageviews through direct clicks and receive an exponential return in your Google search results.

In recent months I have personally seen Google place a large amount of emphasis on the information coming from this type of site, usually referred to as social bookmarking sites. These web pages are generally able to assess the quality of a link's content because a large numbers of users are able to vote the content up or down, thereby screening out useless material from the higher quality fare. Such sites have exploded in popularity in recent years for this very reason; users are able to find interesting reading material pre-judged by like minded individuals.

The problem, for Google anyway, is that they don't spend any time determining whether a story is doing well on one of these sites or not. Google tends to think that any link submitted to one of these sites is valuable, regardless of whether other users like it. For some of the more prosperous sites, new stories are submitted on a PR 5 page and then, if voted up enough, move to a PR 8 page. Even if the link doesn't receive a single view from other users it still gives you a shiny PR 5 link in Google's eyes. Let's explore some of the options when considering your social media marketing campaign.

The Social Voting Medium: Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and More

One of the most popular categories of social media today is those that allows users direct control by voting on a story's merit. This ability to give direct feed back on a link has proven especially effective in producing content that is worth reading. For the sake of this tutorial, however, we only want to focus on the reputation of these sites. Sure, if we made extremely good viral content we might get a ton of clicks, but what we really want is the PR of these sites to flow to ours to increase our rankings.

Of this type of site the most popular example is Digg, with other sites such as Reddit, Propeller, and niche sites like Sphinn trailing behind. When starting a social media marketing campaign, the best solution is to start with Digg and work your way up. I wrote a post a while back on using Digg for SEO that explains the basics of getting started with this type of site.

One of the better sites for getting targeted traffic and a few extra customers is the bookmarking site StumbleUpon. I'll be sure to do a full write up on StumbleUpon in the next few days but we'll hit the basic points here. This is a web browser extension that presents users with random sites that they may like based on pre-determined interests. The user can then vote the site up or down based on whether they like it, creating a voting aspect like Digg and the others mentioned above. Although it does have these features it is more like a social bookmarking site, which we'll discuss in the next section.

Social Bookmarking: Keeping Track of Your Bookmarks with StumbleUpon and del.icio.us

Outside of the voting framework established above exists a different type of social site. These sites rely more on the use of old fashioned bookmarks to keep track of things that may interest a reader. Both StumbleUpon and del.icio.us make themselves available to a user through several different channels. Both of these sites operate upon a web browser extension that allows users to earmark sites that they find interesting or may want to return to later. This is very similar to the old school concept of bookmarking sites, but the two diverge in a social way. The bookmarks that users earmark are then shared with their friends, who in turn share their bookmarks.

These sites don't seem to give quite the PR and ranking boost that the voting sites give, but they can often be used for a quick surge in targeted traffic. After installing the StumbleUpon toolbar you can vote up your own site and recommend it to others. I've personally been able to vote up three or four of my pages and get close to a thousand quick pageviews with a 20% bounce rate. It's not the best way to find your target audience, but it sure can be used to put your material in front of more eyes.

Forming Up the Social Media Marketing Plan

Social media marketing is by no means a science, and what works for one person may not work for another for a number of reasons. Depending on how competitive your field is or the way in which you go about your campaign can make drastic differences in your results. If you tend to send out a large number of links on social sites users will often flag your entries as spam, likely disabling your account and hurting your reputation. When done right and spread out over a longer period of time social media marketing can make a drastic difference in your Google search engine results.

Social Media Marketing is increasing its stake in he market with each passing day. In an age where most content is generated by ordinary people, it has been left up to the ordinary consumers of this content to rate its merit. The social media scene allows users to vote on a particular item's worthiness, from news articles, to funny videos, to photographs of war.

The search engines have quickly realized the merit of this content and are increasingly relying on these sites to provide fresh, up to date search results. The users of these sites basically do the search engine's job by judging which sites are particularly relevant to a given topic. Major players, especially Google, have realized this and have begun placing links from such social stalwarts as Digg toward the top of their ratings.

By learning how these rankings work you can easily start to gain top ten listings on a very routine basis. In my experience I have seen someone use social voting sites to take 9 out of the top 10 results on Google's front page for a term with more than two hundred thousand results. This may not seem like much, but this will certainly workfor a large niche market. If you're ready to jump into the world of social media marketing go ahead and check out our basic social media seo tutorial.

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