The buzz so far in 2009 is that social media is a must, SEO is not enough; The truth is that you would be foolish not to review the social media tools available to see if any of them are worth your while.
From a marketing perspective, best to identify the social media where people interested in your topic hang out, then start connecting. For instance, you might decide that all you need social media is as a way of keeping your ear to the ground.
For SEO purposes, your goal is to get people talking about your content.If you hope to maintain high search engine rankings in a competitive field, a more proactive social media strategy can be an invaluable tool. When people talk on the Internet, they create links that feed the search engines’ algorithms. The basic recipe for social media SEO is…
1. Keep creating lots of great content on your website.
2. Find out where people interested in your content hang out.
3. Network (that means mostly chatting, sharing, asking questions – just as you would at a trade show reception)
4. As you get known, start sharing your own content.
5. As you get more known, people in the social media will start talking about your content (both on the social media site and in their blogs “back home”)
6. Don’t stop.
If you represent multiple clients, there are pros and cons to establishing multiple profiles, one for each client.
Obviously, each one assumes its own identity and each one builds its own circle of friends, but then each one also has to do the work to network; some will, many won’t.
The Web is a reflection of real life. If you understand real life, the Web is not that hard to understand, either. If you understand networking in real life, networking on the Web is quite similar.
If you try to do it all for them, you’ll end up very confused. I did create one other profile specifically because the followership it needs to cultivate is a very specific demographic and b) the account is almost completely a broadcast account and needs to have a much more organizational face than I want for my main account.
Whether on your own or through your SEO or PR agent, you should consider social media as part of your SEO strategy. It is not a necessity for every business, but it is not something to be ignored either.