Break out the flannel and the Chuck Taylors, and put on some Nirvana because we’re in Seattle this week! Okay, so grunge may be not be as mainstream as it once was. But what has become more mainstream is search marketing, which is why we’re here to attend Search Marketing Expo Advanced. Hey, I gotta take my segues where I can get ’em.
Let’s just jump right in, shall we? We’re kicking things off with Hardcore Social Tactics. Think you already know everything there is to know about social? Think again. Vince Blackham, Brent Csutoras, Monique Pouget, and Marty Weintraub still have a few tricks up their sleeves, and they’re about to share them while Greg Finn and Eric Enge moderate, so get comfy.
First up, we have Monique Pouget. She starts off with Pinterest.
We all hear it’s valuable, right? She’s going to talk about using if for mining social and marketing data, and how you can build content around what people are pinning.
Use this to see what’s being pinned from your own site, but also as a quick competitive research tool: https://www.pinterest.com/source/YOURWEBSITE.COM/
Add this bookmarklet to your browser: https://bit.ly/interest-bookmarklet It will allow you to export anything from Pinterest into a .csv file so you can easily sort data like what people are pinning and their user names, which is really interesting because sometimes people use the same user names across social networks. They may also just be using their first and last name, which is super easy to Google.
Pinterest Tools
PinReach
This tool allows you to add people’s pins, and figure out their most popular pins, and their most active followers.
Pinpuff
Some of the same metrics as PinReach, but you can also see the “pin worth,” which is anything tied to a landing page, or anything tied to a sale. It also shows the CPC. Anotehr great way to compare Pinterest profiles.
Sleuthing
This isn’t a tool, it’s just old fashioned sleuthing. This is where we’re thinking about personae, who are these people, what can you add to the conversation? You can use this for content creation, as well as prospect lists of the people most likely to share your content in the future.
Pinterest isn’t just a silo—this is what people are sharing. Look at their captions—how do they speak? Get a feel for how they talk. Then go to their site and you can see what they love. It may not always be as clearly laid out, but people are sharing what they love, so you can get some good insight for your content.
You can also use their captions to create word clouds to analyze what people are talking about, using a tool like Wordle.
Create a guide to inform the rest of your link building team what they need to be going for, and what kind of content you need to be creating for your link building strategy.
Convert Twitter Followers to Prospects
Hoosaid and FollowerWonk will help you identify influencers by searching Twitter bios for certain terms and trends. Amplicate, Topsy, SocialMention will also help in these efforts.
You can also use advanced search operators on Twitter.com, as well as Google to find information that isn’t shared.
After you identify the influencers, you want to dig a little deeper. Use twtrland and Twitalyzer to see people’s top followers, what’s been retweeted the most, the people who are influenced the most by your subject, network demographics, and the people they’ve connected with most recently.
Friend or Follow is another awesome tool. You can see how many people your subject follows, and how many follow him. If someone follows few but has many followers, he’s an industry leader. This also looks like a prospect list.
Twitter Lists
Separate your twitter prospects into lists so you can divide and conquer. This will help you figure out how to talk to people and customize your message.
Follow up with Twitter prospects that don’t convert after first touch. Rob Ousbey has a good process for this strategy:
Monitoring
Monique loves Hootsuite for monitoring. One cool trick is to use one of the search terms as the URL for your site. By adding that as a search term, you pull in all the tweets that shared that site. Really cool from a branding perspective, or from a competitor perspective. Ask yourself, Can I intervene? Can I share more?
Monique says she’s not going to go too much into Facebook because Marty’s going to cover that.
And a buzzer goes off! Greg is not playing around with the moderation! Monique finishes up quickly.
In Facebook, you can do private messaging, use cover photos, there’s some cool stuff going on with Timeline, so check that out. Facebook’s helping on the organic side of things.
Open Graph
This will help you see visual representations of people and their followers, and how they’re sharing your information.
Monique loves this idea from Mike King: https://moz.com/blog/keyword-level-demographics It helps you create these pieces of content directed at the personae you’re targeting. Gives you info you can’t find on Facebook insights.
Up next is Marty Weintraub. His presentation is called Extreme Social Tactics.
Marty says he can’t help but think back to 2007, which kicked off serious social marketing thought. Back then, we focused on Wikipedia, MySpace, and we were just starting with Facebook, and Facebook Groups. It’s been a wild trip since then because now we know what we can target with marketing.
Targeting is at risk. How long are we going to be able to target people with certain terms? Right now you can send single segments to a page, but he’s thinking we might lose that.
Greg Finn wrote a great post about this about paid organification of Facebook.
What is Facebook? It’s a glorified e-mail list with little chance of the information jumping the wall without you paying Facebook.
Our friend Dennis studied 100M pageviews on Facebook last year. At its base, FB is a subscription list. Don’t get confused by it. People can like you. Conversations happen among users, among brand pages, between brands and friends. It’s very simple.
As a brand, if I post on a page, my followers see it. They might engage. I’m speaking of content now, but there are other applications. Conversations break out between friends on the wall. You understand this part, right? Their followers see it play out in their News Feeds. But it’s not as good as it was before they neutered the virility of Facebook [I’m quoting that verbatim, just in case you’re wondering. -Michelle]. FB has ratcheted it down because they’re a big company and it makes sense.
The ticker neuters the visibility of it. It goes by really fast. It isn’t sitting large in the News Feed. It limits its ability to jump the wall. The part where it goes from friends to friends isn’t there. When friends endorse something, we all know it’s very valuable.
When you’re looking at that increased place where friends of friends interact with a brand and others see it, that’s big. It’s called a sponsored story. Don’t worry about how you get to these types of ad units, just know they’re there. The kind of ads that jump the wall come in two flavors: the paid kind, and content or application.
First, start your content on a site you own with proper open graphs with the right size image and the right description so when you put it on your FB page, it looks right. Then when you make an FB ad out of it, it also looks right.
We know on LinkedIn, I can target a lot of journalists, but most people don’t know you can run that in Facebook too. Run Alpha patterns. Like “magazine A” in the employment bucket, and you can find amazing people to follow.
Summary
- Page post ad (first degree) – Don’t worry about it. It’s expensive, site & wall traffic, likes
- Page post like story (second degree) – inexpensive, traffic to sit, few likes
- Page like story – (second degree) expensive traffic to wall, many likes
When someone likes your brand, all their friends see it, and the whole thing just keeps going like that. It’s really amazing.
Look for the stuff that works with your people. Then you’ll have a really focused community, and you can decide what to do with it. How to channel it offsite.
When you hear about legislation about how things online should be curtailed, really think about it. We need to have open minds as marketers.
Now it’s Brent’s turn. He’s going to talk about viral traffic and the different networks out there. He’s not going to talk about FB or Twitter, but tactics.
He got into content marketing about six years ago, and he wants to pass on what he’s learned. Some of it is about concepts and philosophies.
Most importantly, content marketing still works! It actually works better today than ever. It’s harder, takes more effort, focus, and work, but when you do it right, the effects are astounding. I want you to get an idea of why you should be interested in this.
For example, a Chinese gangster shared a photo on line and it went viral. We shared it, and we got quite a few good links and good traffic from it.
On Search Engine Journal, we do Friday humor posts, and we’ve seen some good traction on that. Anywhere from 30K to 80K views. Also seen good traction on Pinterest. It’s a marketing blog, so we see some resistance, so to get that kind of traction on social media is important to us.
Just want to emphasize that content marketing really does work. You should be concerned with social signals right now.
Be Prepared to Succeed
It may sound simple, but it’s really important. The majority of people tend to look at social media as a band-aid solution to get links, traffic, or conversions. It’s a very narrow approach rather than having a real strategy or making it part of your business plan. This is how people are finding content. This is the future.
You need to have a dedicated team, person, or contractor. Have someone who’s nimble and able to respond quickly. They need to understand the networks, what categories to target. You need to have established networks. If you don’t take the time for it, you won’t be able to make your voice heard. When you have a story go popular, how are you going to get it on FB?
Biggest wins I’ve had on social media, I never thought would succeed. Ended up getting millions of views, and I didn’t even think they were very good. Like the Chinese gangster guy. I didn’t think it was that great, but we put it out there, and it worked. If you’re not nimble, you’ll miss out. Might not seem like a hardcore tactic, but it’s important.
Monitor Your Site in Social
Most social sites allow you to enter your URL to see what’s there. You can do it on Reddit, Digg, Delicious, etc. You may find something you can transition into your own existing content. Sometimes you’ll find an image on one of those sites, and you can connect it to your content. It’s a really basic tactic.
Go to the site, do the searches, make a bookmark folder, and just monitor everything. It goes back to tip one—be nimble. It’s important to have diversity on these sites. Don’t submit your own all the time. Find someone who’s submitting your stuff, and promote them.
One of the hardest sites to succeed in right now. It’s layer upon layer of code band-aids and fixes to keep spammers out, so it’s really difficult to use. Most people get discouraged and give up. Here are a few tips to be successful on Reddit.
- Don’t worry about accounts
- Silent bans and filters
- new to reddit
- new to subreddit
- account filtered
- domain filtered
- manual approval
- Checks (while logged out)
- view profile for page not found (if this happens, you’re done. it’s time to create a new account. Reddit does not monitor the subreddits. It just acts as a dashboard. You can contact subreddit owners directly.)
- check new section
Learn These Rules
- Understand where to submit
- redditlist.com
- biggest isn’t always best
- Know the subreddit rules
- TIL has to be two months old
- bestof is only for Reddit links
- NSFW needs to be nude
- WorldNews excludes US
- Participate where it is active
- Entertainment
- Show in top 10 on submission
We haven’t seen a hug amount of traction from this.
- Focus on your network
- Pinterest cares about the ACCOUNT (Going to share this with you: Pinterest doesn’t care about username, e-mail, boards—if you can figure out what that means, then good luck to you)
- #tags for search
- Weekends and evenings
Hat tip to Ross Weale @wealer for this information.
Success with Stumbleupon
- Network Tree/Popular Algorithm
- build network appropriately
- share with network stragtegically to get positive votes
- Stay Very Active
- show on on /content/
- choose categories and tags strategically
- run stumbleupon ad campaign
- help whitelist your domain
- ID related tags
- Learn subsriber numbers
- choose real stumbleupon interests for tags
What I’m Not Saying
There’s a lot I won’t say in public about these sites, but will say in private settings, so come up and talk to me and I’ll be happy to share with you.
Last, we come to Vince. He’s going to cover why content marketing is more important than ever.
His presentation is called Why You Should Be on Pinterest. He starts out by showing a video, which is just about impossible to liveblog, and is just one reason why you have to try to make it to these conferences if you can!
We’ve been doing a lot of visual content and viral stuff lately. It’s getting tougher to get your content out there, but Pinterest really helps.
We all know content is king, but I’m going to talk ab out the visual aspect of that.
Visual Content is King.
Infographics get no love. We thought it would be awesome to post them on Pinterest, but it turns out people on Pinterest don’t like data. It’s more of a how-to thing. As cute as your infographics may be, Pinterest may not be the best place for them.
I want to talk about some things that really work. First, is the size. He shows a photo of the rake turned wine glass rack which got thousands of views on Pinterest, but didn’t turn into site traffic. So make the photos small enough to pique interest, but not so large that they don’t have to click through to your site.
Make your images less than 5K pixels long – make people go to your site, and you’ll get a ton of repins. There’s also a lot of shares on FB.
Use a large title and easy-to-read steps for instructographics.
They did one called 21 household uses for vodka – household stuff gets shared a lot, and does really well. They’ve seen almost 300,000 visits from that one.
With Pinterest, bounce rates have gone down. They average about 2.5 minutes from instructographics pinned on Pinterest. They’ve also tracked instructographics for conversions, and they’re doing really well. One company dropped their radio advertising to focus on Pinterest, and their traffic skyrocketed.
It’s not a backlink generator. It’d be great if it was like Digg in the old days, but it’s not.
Quick Tips for Pinterest
- Make it about your product, but not. Make it relevant, but not about yourself. How to use your product, but not about the product.
- DIY and how-tos are the most popular and most successful. Top 12 lists are ideal 10 not enough 15 too much
- Use ubersuggest to mine for ideas of what people are looking for, and how to turn it into a DIY piece
- consider how the subject can cross over into multiple categories so they’ll move to the top of the category pages. You’ll get a lot of repins, and a lot of traffic.
- Two – three times a day is more than enough to get a good push. Look for peak hours. Between 4pm and 11pm is the best time when people are most active. Still get some during work hours, but not as much.
- If something doesn’t work, repurpose it, and do it again.
Move away from what’s going to get you links to what’s going to get people to the site. Start thinking “resourcebait” instead of “linkbait.”
Also use tineye to check for attribution. A lot of people will take stuff without crediting you for it.
And that’s it for the first session! Can you believe all this is from just one session?! I may need oxygen before the day is out. Stay tuned for more SMX Advanced awesomeness!
Get all the SMX Advanced 2012 coverage here!
