SEO Information from Internet Marketing Professional, Hari Krishna D

What is Social Media?


Social Media Will Change Your Business

Social media as defined on Wikipedia is “Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and "building" of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories, and understandings.”

Different forms of Social media: Internet forums, message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. Examples of social media applications are Google Groups (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), Facebook (social networking), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), Flickr (photo sharing), Twitter (social networking and microblogging) and other.

The trend continues to grow as more and more sites appear and existing sites allow for much more interaction and user generated content.

These social networks allow you to post articles, podcasts, videos, Blogs, bookmarks, bios, profiles and comments. With social media it is very easy to share your marketing messages.

The advent of social networking sites and user generated content also opens up new opportunities for businesses to get involved and really interact with and market to their audience in a different way.

How to benefit from social media?

Facebook.com is a site that was designed for social networking. You connect with friends, family and colleagues by searching the Facebook member database.

Create a Blog and Act with the Feedback: Many popular Blogs have comments and feedback from the Blog readers.

Participate in different ways depending on the particular site, but usually you start a group related to your product or service, posting your interests, posting comments on the Blog or Message Board forum within the particular website. You can post announcements, list products or services. You can announce events, newsletters, webinars etc.

As search engines pull twitter updates into the SERPS, Create a twitter account. They like history and they like quality. They also like volume. So, get an account now if you don’t have one already. Tweet often but keep it natural – and tweet quality. Tweet when you have something to ask, share or teach.

Things to remember while you Tweet: Use keywords – but don’t stuff with keywords. If the tweets are about your industry, you should be using keywords naturally anyway.

If you are going to retweet your messages at different times of the day to be more likely to catch your audience, make sure you vary them a little bit. Use links in your tweets back to the relevant content on your site and share the link. Make sure you use your keyword in your bio.

The next post is on "Blogging", A very important act to keep the content fresh.

What is the difference between search engine optimization and social media marketing?

The easiest way to explain the difference between search engine marketing and social media campaigns is by comparing how quickly you see results.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) writing works, but it usually takes time to see an increase in traffic. No matter how good of a job you do at incorporating keywords into your web content, it takes a while for search engines to notice you. You also need to spend time building links to your content if you want to improve your rankings and subsequent traffic. In general, it will take longer to see results from search engine optimization, but you’ll likely reap the benefits of your hard work for a much longer period of time with little maintenance. This is what I believe is the great source for your Permanent Traffic.

Social media campaigns, on the other hand, can bring a quick spike in traffic and – hopefully – sales. You can build a contest that you promote through Twitter or Facebook and begin to see results almost immediately.The down side to social media campaigns is that they have a short shelf life. Twitter and Facebook are constantly being renewed with fresh information and content and it doesn’t take long for your message to get buried by more recent content. Ideally, you’re working with a content marketing expert who will help you use search engine optimization to reach your long term goals and build a solid foundation for residual traffic AND put together timely social media campaigns to help you with time sensitive promotions.

I do work more on Search Engines than Twitter or Facebook. I do Social Media Optimization to support my SEO.