Puget Sound Business

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a term familiar to Internet marketing world. A relatively new term, social media optimization (SMO) is now gaining popularity among online marketers. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Diggit, Delicious, and other popular blogging, news or social networking sites are revolutionizing the world of online marketing. Many popular brands have already started their social media campaigns by joining an account in Facebook or Twitter. Blogs and articles are on their way to create more traffic to the Web site through social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Kaboodle and more.

With the advent of social media sites, new possibilities arose for brand marketing. Companies are exploring innovative ways to reach out to millions of customers who are active in their social networking community. A recent study conducted by Interbands shows that companies like CocaCola, IBM, GE, Microsoft, Google and others have gained hundreds of thousands of fans in popular social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter. Another study from ad network Chitika found that social media sites such as Facebook and Digg are more likely to create returning traffic to a Web site than popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo. The study found that more than one fifth of the users referred to a site by Facebook visited that site at least four times in the course of one week whereas only 12 percent of Google-referred visitors remained loyal.

The above findings further underline the importance of optimizing a Web site for social media. Any company that wants to sustain its brand value among reputed customers should immediately resort to social media optimization if they haven’t done it yet. Optimizing a Web site for social media gives double advantage. Now SEO” onClick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/outgoing/article_exit_link’);” href=”"http://www.idslogic.com/link-popularity-building.html”>link”>SEO consultants are using this media to promote websites and create online buzz. Social networking sites are also very good sources for link building purpose. While the process helps a business reach out to millions of users directly, it also automatically helps increase the search engine ranking of the Web site. The reason behind this is that search engines such as Google and Yahoo have assigned a high page rank for social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Diggit, etc., so a link to these sites automatically adds to increasing the page ranking of your Web site.

Social media is here to stay. The earlier you catch it, the better.

Blogging is a fairly new social media platform that is fast becoming a popular form of marketing for many businesses.  As a professional blogger myself, I believe that every business should participate in blogging.  Just like every business should be following what people are saying about them via social networks and social media, every business should be blogging as well.   

Many business owners believe that having a company blog or participating in social networking is a waste of time and provides no return on investment.  Tell that to Dell, the computer company that attributed $3 million in sales due to Twitter.

So, why should your company have a blog?  Here are a couple reasons:

You have more of a chance of being discovered in a search engine like Google.  Unlike regular websites, blogs are on the search engines’ radars because blogs are updated more often.  Search engines love fresh, relevant content.

Blogs enable your company to interact with your customers, plus you can build a community of loyal customers who appreciate your services and what you have to say.  By providing value via tips, news or articles on topics related to your business, you establish a relationship with your customers.  They will remember you the next time they need your product or service.

A good example of a business that provides value via their blog is this San Diego Cosmetic Dentist…

Dr. Timothy Collins and Dr. David Landau are dentists who own a practice called Complete Dental Health located in San Diego, California.  Besides owning a regular static website that contains a host of information about their business, they also own a blog that offers dental health tips and advice, plus news about the dentistry field. 

Let’s say that someone in San Diego was searching for a dentist, but this web-savvy person wanted to find a dentist with a blog.  He/she does a Google blogsearch for “San Diego dentist”.  Guess what blog shows up in the top results?  That’s right – the Complete Dental Health’s blog shows up near the top of the list.   So the potential customer reads the Complete Dental Health blog and likes the information.  This potential customer then decides to call Complete Dental Health to set up an appointment. 

Although this is a very simplistic example of what happens when you blog for business, maybe it will banish any of those thoughts that blogging is just a “trend” and isn’t worth exploring as a way to attract new customers.

Copyright (c) 2009 Chuck W

Social media networks are shaping a new era in the online community. The number of visitors and subscribers are increasing tremendously as we speak. A perfect example of the success of the social networks was Facebook’s increase in the number of visits by 50% during the last year.

The reason behind the success of these websites is due to the human touch they add to the digital world . Everybody is looking for old buddies from school , a friend they haven’t seen for a while or even get to know new people in their same profession or share the same passion .

Many charities and fundraisers have realized the unbeatable effect of social media as compared to any other online or offline marketing tool. Many have started to build their own websites and started to build social presence in the major social sites , build groups , post articles and become active members in these sites.

“Too poor to donate? Digg to help sick kids! Let’s raise Awareness!” http://digg.com/odd_stuff/Too_poor_to_donate_Digg_to_help_sick_kids_Let_s_raise_Awareness caught my attention while I was using digg.com a social media site . This charity project used digg to promote their Christmas campaign for gift donations for sick children. They were asking for the visitor help to digg their post to reach as many people as they can and a generous contribution will be appreciated .

On Facebook you can easily find hundreds of charities building their groups to raise awareness of the visitors and invite them to contribute. These groups are at finger tips away from you , All what you need to do is search the groups for charity or fundraising and then the decision is up to you.

Social websites were also built with the sole intention of funding charities and raising the awareness of online visitors of the importance of the social contribution to the success of any charity project. Squidoo is a social network that came to existence with thoughtful understanding of the commitment of any business to their community while maintaining the limit of profits to maintain their on going activities. They provide a mutual interest for the visitors and the charity projects. Squidoo enables anyone to build a page on a subject that they have passion about ,write as many pages as they like, then Squidoo uses advertising on these pages. The revenue is these advertisements is shared between the page creator and a charity project. They also offer the choice of donating all your income to the charity you choose from a list of charities that they sponsor.

Donations are the back bone of any charity and fundraising which originate from the social contribution to the mission and the work of the volunteers dedicating their time and effort to its success. No doubt that social media networks made it easier for them to reach people at the ease of their homes. They can easily add a smile on a sleepy face feeling that they did their dues to the society.