Social Marketing

Social marketing is rapidly becoming an essential part of any Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign. Social marketing is about creating a place where peoples can interact and socialize with other like-minded individuals.  Eventually, the goal is to form a community, a place where each user has their own identity and returns on a regular basis.  This goal is achieved by luring people that have common interests together, and get them communication with one another regularly.  Eventually an interactive community is formed.

There is an amazing amount of website technology that has emerged from these social, community-based websites.  Sites such as Digg and Sphinn display up to the minute, user-submitted news headlines and articles from around the web.  These articles are then voted on by other users, and ultimately they determine which ones get front-page billing.  Blogs are another way users can contact each other and express themselves within a community.  A blog can be thought of as an online diary, a place where someone can keep their own thoughts and articles together.  Blogs are hugely popular, with some of the more popular ones such as MySpace and Facebook integrating the diary portion with the community portion. 

Internet marketing and community building should go hand-in-hand.  When creating the marketing strategy, building a community should be factored in as well.  A good place to start building the community is doing research.  The needs of the end user should be analyzed, and different ways to attract users should be used.  These can include offering free resources to the user, information, help, and other incentives.  These give the customer a value to joining the community.

An easy way to begin a community on your own site is to integrate forums.  Forums are a way for visitors to your site to set up free accounts where they can create an identity and share their thoughts for others.  The advantages to having a populated forum are two-fold.  First, giving your site visitors a place to congregate will encourage them to come back for repeat visits to the site. Secondly, Google gives a lot of weight to organic, community-created content such as forum content.  The forums become a resource themselves to create link-bait to your site.  Forums are a place where your visitors can get educated and educate each other on the content of your website.

There are many Blog sites out there, and nearly all of them are free.  It is a no-brainer, then to create Blogs for your own website.  Facebook, Xanga, Blogger, and Wordpress are all places where anyone can set up a free blog, including links back to their website.  These links help increase web presence.  Also, the Blogs can be optimized for SEO themselves, and can begin to show up for your keywords in the search engines.  The key to having a successful blog running alongside your website is to update the blog regularly with original content. Also, inviting users to comment on your blog entries can be a boon for SEO.  Blog comments can also be a bane, however, so make sure you have your spam filter turned on and can approve comments before they go live. 

Be sure to link to other blogs with a similar theme.  You will begin to create a network with other users and it will strengthen your blog within the eyes of search engines as well. RSS feeds are another fairly new web technology that adds value and relevancy to your site.  An RSS feed is a live updated feed of news for pretty much any category of news and updates.

SEO should permeate throughout all of the marketing campaign.  Be sure to utilize keywords and links to the best of your ability when creating the Blog articles.  Creating and running a community is a great addition to any SEO campaign, and can be a lot of fun as well!