We often get clients ask us questions about social media and how it affects their online business. The most common question we get is –
“Should we have a Facebook and Twitter account?”
Our answer is pretty much the same everytime – “it depends”
Photo Credit - Matt Hamm
The answer isn’t as simple as yes or no. It genuinely does depend on the client and the market they are working in. We work with many clients across varied industries, some B2C and some B2B, some both.
We tend to get asked this question by clients who we currently run SEO campaigns for, so the question to us is not only whether a social media campaign is suitable, but also how it integrates with the existing SEO campaign. Most businesses will have a number of marketing inititives, no matter what they are, they need to work together to deliver a consistent message to the target market.
In this article we’re going to look at whether a social media campaign will provide you with a good return on investment and how to integrate such a campaign with your current SEO efforts.
Do you need or want social media?
As mentioned earlier, this depends on your target market and your business.
Does your ideal customer hang out on social media sites?
Ask your customers, add a short optional survey to your sales or follow up process to see what percentage of your customers hang out online.
Would they pay attention to your campaign?
Some customers may be active on social networking sites for personal reasons but couldn’t care less about your business and its efforts to communicate with them. They only use these sites for chatting with friends or to waste away their lunch hour, so try to assess if your product or business can grab their interest and get them to take the action you want.
Are they savvy/enthusiastic enough to participate in campaigns?
Try to assess your market and if they will participate in your campaigns. If they are not naturally savvy with the internet, you need to bear this in mind and make sure that you make things as easy as possible for them.
Is your business going to attract repeat customers?
I think this is one of the most important questions to ask. If you are selling a product or service that is a one off, or a very rare purchase, then getting customers involved in a social media campaign may not provide you with a good return on investment. You can of course use social media to interact with customers who haven’t yet bought from you. However in my opinion, customers are easier to interact with after they’ve already bought from you and you then follow up on this.
Is their someone who can take responsibility for social media accounts?
Again this is important, giving a certain person or a particular team responsibility for your social media accounts often works best. This can ensure that a consistent message and tone are communicated as well as keeping things organised better. Also it helps ensure that the accounts are maintained if they are someone’s responsibility.
It also helps as a single person can put a personal touch on the account and become familiar with the people they interact with. The thing to bear in mind is to make sure that this person or the team understands the overall goals of the campaign.
These are the type of questions you need to be asking the client when looking at the idea of a social media campaign. Some clients lend themselves very well to social media whilst others either don’t or require some creativity.
How to integrate social media with your SEO efforts
Understanding
For me, the core of integration of marketing campaigns, no matter what they are, is making sure that everyone linked to the campaigns has a good understanding of what each campaign is trying to achieve.
If you are running an SEO campaign for a client who is also running TV and media advertising, you need to understand these campaigns and know whether they have any effect on your own work. Even better is there anyway to leverage these campaigns for your SEO efforts? If other agencies are being used, do they have resource to help with online marketing as well?
Educating on SEO
If your client has an in-house person or team who is going to take responsibility for social media, then you need to spend a bit of time helping them understand what you are doing from an SEO angle and get them to bear it in mind when doing their work. They need to be aware of how their work impacts on SEO and when they can help.
Leveraging for links
Probably one of the most important parts of the integration is trying to leverage any social media efforts for links, a good social media campaign will naturally attract links so you need to ensure you are benefiting as much as possible.
For example, a good social media campaign will be viral and easy to share – you need to make sure that links shared are followed by Google and pointing to relevant pages so you know where link juice will be going.
Reputation Management
Anyone running a social media campaign needs to be aware of the potential negative impact of a wrong word or move by them and how it reflects on the company. Your concern is going to be how to reflects on search results! The last thing you want is to be trying to shift a website off the first page of results after a mess up by the social media person!
On-site Integration
Some social media campaigns will need some kind of on-site work as well, it could be a new page of content, a widget or a share button. Either way you need to be made aware of any changes such as this in case there are any SEO implications or ways you can leverage the changes for yourself.
Those are just a few points that you can bear in mind when running social media and SEO campaigns at the same time. If you have anything to add feel free to drop a comment below.