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The New World of Social Media Marketing
When the first notion of social media was unveiled it was never thought of as a medium with which traffic could actually be driven to brands and converted to sales. Now, with the Social Media permeating every facet of our lives it’s almost impossible to imagine it any other way.
The idea for every SEO and Social Media Guru is to leverage the power of your social network in a fashion that is advantageous to the end user. This is a very risky venture as (if implementation goes poorly, or is way over the top) you can quickly find yourself on the receiving end of bad press, and at worse a loss in your social networks effectiveness. Recently there has been a lot of litmus testing in this area as to what is too much and what is too little to ask for before the end user turns away. The answer seems to be that most users (better than 60%) are willing to “give up the goods” so to speak and jump on board your brand etc.
How to leverage that data:
so you’ve managed to build yourself a little social empire, you have a great Klout.com score, and your Facebook likes and comments are off the chart. So what do you do with all that power? USE IT! Take it by the neck and teach it whose boss. Continue to tweet about relevant topics, use info-graphics (albeit sparingly) and try to convert those participants into possible conversions for the services your company provides.
The does and don’ts of the Facebook world:
first of all (Thanks Mat Clayton of Gingerhost.com) there are plenty of good pieces of code out there (xfbml, etc…) written by people who spend a great deal of time thinking about exactly how much is too much. Recently at the Distilled / SEOmoz conference in Boston Team Gaveltek got to spend much of the time sleeping, until Mat Clayton got up and started discussing HTML5, CSS3, AJAX, etc… what we took away was that the placement and the tracking of that data (via Facebooks built in tools with their built in code) wasn’t doing the trick. Mat managed to nail down some pretty simple techniques that work wonders regarding conversions. Here is an example of some of Mat’s Facebook Code:
<div id=”fb-root”></div>
<script>
(function() {
window.fbAsyncInit = function() {
FB.Event.subscribe(‘edge.create’, function(response) {
_gaq.push(['page', 'like', response]);
});
FB.Event.subscribe(‘edge.remove’, function(response) {
_gaq.push(['page', 'unlike', response]);
});
};
var e = document.createElement(‘script’); e.async = true;
e.src = document.location.protocol +
‘//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1′;
document.getElementById(‘fb-root’).appendChild(e);
}());
</script>
This code is a clean and mean version of the Facebook “like” function. There are plenty more to choose from but this one struck me as interesting in its vast difference from what Facebook themselves offer. By implementing this style of code into your site (tying into the power of your social network) you offer your user more opportunities to intermingle with other people and spread the word. The important piece of this whole blog is MAKE THE USER EXPERIENCE FUN, EASY, and INCORPORATE THEIR SOCIAL NETWORK. Power in numbers most definitely is in full effect in this case.
How do I make a great user experience?
Quite simply, DON’T OVER DO IT! Don’t put 40 like buttons, 80 different social outlet buttons. Pick the relevant outlets and use them. Put the majority of your social media icons at the top of your page or on the right hand side. I won’t spend much more time on this, we have all seen sites that use good social media, pay attention and as well all know “imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.”
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