Your SEO Guide starts here:
Issue One (1) – The first step – Choosing your keywords
Issue Two (2) – Planning your site – Making the structure
Issue Three (3) – Social Media – Building your brand
Issue Four (4) – Tell search engines where you are
Issue Five (5) – Link building – Get your votes
Issue Six (6) – Write your articles – Blogging
Issue Seven (7) – Building your network – The social kind
Issue Eight (8) – Spending money – Paid advertising
Okay, you’ve now got a website plan with all the keywords and your customer flow thought out because you have read the first two blogs (Choosing Your Keywords and Making The Structure), now it’s time to actually start thinking about building your brand.
You need a website. So, go away, and go back to Issue One (1) if you don’t have a website yet, and then come back and have a look when you do.
Okay, you’re back (or you’ve been with us the whole time!) … So, let’s start.
What is social? Why do we do it? It’s really important to get our duck face selfies all over the Instagram, isn’t it? Well, no. When you think about social, you generally think about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc… but that’s because you are probably not used to working social media for a company or a brand.
Actually, what you want to start thinking about now are Blogs. You can blog about literally anything! Just tie it back to your product or service in some sort of way.
So, go make a blog. Then come back.
Okay, you’re back… Let’s start.
Now you have written a blog, you should check out the ‘Benefits of Blogging’ written by yours truly, it will help you to understand the power of writing articles. (Ok, so let’s assume you’ve done that) What are you going to do with it?
Well, you’re going to write blogs. Then you are going to post them to your social channels.
The first mistake everyone makes is they post or link all their socials together and make only the one post. Then they push the one post across all their company social networks. BIG, BIG, BIG MISTAKE!
See, when you are doing your companies social, you need to think of it in two ways. Firstly, what is your brand’s voice? Secondly, if you were a user, what would you like to see on what platform?
Now, let’s go back to the very beginning so you can pick the right social network from the start.
Social media planning
Firstly, always use the following:
1 – Twitter – Google indexes every Tweet. So every time you Tweet, you get a page on Google
2 – LinkedIn – The professional environment. Doesn’t matter what you are selling or doing, if you’re a company you need to be on LinkedIn
3 – Google Plus – The worst social media, but it’s Google, so get on there
Then take a look at your brand image and how you want to engage with your target audience. It might be that you want to have casual conversations, so you make a Facebook company page (never, ever, ever, ever make a Facebook user page, it’s pointless and another one of those classic mistakes). If you want to showcase your wares all the time then make an Instagram account. Or if you want to show people common elements of your brand then make a Pinterest profile. You can use trusted SMM panels for faster engagement as well.
It’s entirely up to you.
But, whatever you make, you have to use. So make sure you have the time.
Then, set yourself some goals. I have Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn and Instagram so something along the following lines of…
- I will do fifteen (15) interactions on Twitter per day (this mean, tweets, retweets, favourites or follows)
- I will do one (1) Facebook post per day
- I will do one (1) Google Plus post per day
- I will do one (1) LinkedIn post per day and interact in 3 group conversations
Then, allocated yourself a certain amount of time. It might be from 9-10am every day.
Then, get yourself a social media management platform (I prefer HootSuite).
Then, write yourself all your posts according to your audience.
Then, add them all into your management platform.
Then, make sure you push out your posts at different times of the day.
Then, make sure you monitor your notifications on your phone or via email.
Then, make sure you react to them immediately.
Your personality on social media
One of the most important things to do is ensure you are writing for the correct audience on each platform. For example, LinkedIn is obviously professional, Facebook and Google+ are casual etc.
Now onto something a lot of people don’t realise.
Your Facebook company page is not a tool to recruit new customers. It is a tool that is used to provide your current customer’s information to re-engage them so they become repeat customers.
Think about yourself again, when you want to buy new shoes, you don’t go to Facebook and type into the search bar “new shoes”. You instead go to Google and do that. If you are a shoe fan, you might be browsing your Facebook and see something from a company you follow pop-up with a message like this “We’ve got a special on these shoes this week” which will inspire you to buy them. Hence, your ‘followers’ become repeat customers.
Facebook advertising is for generating new customers. These are through sponsored ads, so even if you don’t like a companies page, you’ll see them anyway. These are based on reading a person’s profile (apparently Facebook reads over 1,000,000 touchpoints from your profile) and feeding selected content to a target audience.
Separating your social media
There are two parts that a lot of people find difficult to separate:
Social Advertising – To generate new customers
Social Posting – To re-engage current customers
When you are writing your posts, keep that in mind. None of your current customers want information they will already know. They only want fresh, new, unknown content.
So, that’s how to do social, watch out for the next issue – how to tell search engines where you are.
