Social networking is an essential element to positioning your business via the Intenet.
A social networking strategy is very individual to what your business has to offer. It is about two things the first is “authority” and the second is “engagement”
Authority
Maybe authority it too strong a word. It should read “authoritative” in your business sector. This is mainly gained via your own website content and blog. A practical authoritative measure may be the number of people that link to your content. This has long been established as Page Rank via back links. This is a dying requirement in relation to search search result placement and is giving way to relevancy. Bing for example places far more emphasis on relevancy than the number links you have. Google has recognised this and is, due to the grey industry built up around back links, moving toward relevancy and performance.
Engagement
However, there is authority to be gained via other methods. Participation and even hosting an industry forum. This connects directly to your potential customers. We have seen this work very successfully at money saving expert where people go to find answers and ask advice on all kinds of financial matters. Personal referrals really work. For the younger market this is a given they ask for advice from their online friends and the popular votes wins. This has not escaped the eyes of the search engines who are all involved / own leading social networking websites.
As a business you will be an expert in your chosen field. So spread the word, demonstrate your expertise and although you cannot be too blatant about it sell your company. Your participation and profile authority will not be missed by search engine’s. Remember that “no follow” or link redirects can still be followed by search engines.
Creating your own forum is clearly a good thing to do. It increases relevant traffic to your domain which builds trust and loyalty. Within our business SEOmoz, they provide free and premium SEO tools, have a very active forum. Members can post questions and receive answers from SEOmoz SEO’s and other SEO’s like Winning Inch. Of course this not a great model as you need to pay to ask a question but never the less it is an effective marketing platform.
Google too has a very active webmaster forum. This helps webmaster’s with problems to ask questions and receive answers. Questions are primarily answered by more experienced SEO’s /Webmasters who give their time voluntarily. Winning Inch SEO’s must participate in this forum and required to maintain a level 7 plus authority ranking. This is the forum we use to build our own authority, is a great source of new business and maintains our knowledge base as changes in Google’s search algorithms can be identified early.
Hosting your own blog is another way to engage / extend your keyword base / exposure to a larger audience. Winning Inch provides a blog customisation service so that your blog matches your website. We recommend WordPress as it is very well supported, is mature and is packed with relevant helpful features such as pro-actively “pinging” search engines and social networking website every time you create a new post.
We add a Twitter feed, much like the “ping” service, your blog is tightly integrated with Twitter. We also recommend adding a Twitter widget to your website home page. This creates maximum exposure of blog both at a Twitter level and website.
The Winning Inch social networking service is available to identify the right social networking sites for your business. Call us for more details on 01286 711699.
The other option is to engage one of our Digital marketing managers to manage the entire process, and much more, for you.