Social Media Planning and Generating Leads

I had the opportunity to watch two Stukent webinars regarding the use of Social Media. The first webinar featured Adelyn Biedenbach, who is the Director of Digital Media for the Florida Panthers hockey team. Adelyn talked about Social Media Planning and how important it is to a business. There is so much more to the effective use of social media than just having an account and posting every now and then. A business must be intentional about what content they are sharing out and when they are sharing it out.

Adelyn Biedenbach, Florida Panthers

Having a Social Media account means that your followers have 24/7 access to your business and although it may not be on your mind to post at 3am, customers might be. Knowing when you customers are active and what they are interested in seeing is an important step to building a lasting relationship through social media. It is also important to keep the content relevant. One way to help with this is to develop and utilize a calendar system. Using a calendar, the company can not only schedule posted content, but they can differentiate between media types such as pictures, video or promotions to mix up the content and keep it fresh. When it comes to planning, it is critical to remember that you are posting to appeal to your target group and you must understand what they want to be relevant.

Bree Nakatani, Wishpond

The second webinar featured Bree Nakatani who is the Success Lead for Wishpond. In her webinar, she discussed the process for soliciting leads through social media. There are several ways that companies can utilize social media to connect with new customers and ultimately make conversions. One way of doing that is to run a sweepstakes. In this scenario, the company will offer up a good or service from the company for free of charge, all they have to do is enter the sweepstakes and agree to the terms. The terms of the sweepstakes usually involves the customer authorizing the social media platform to automatically add them as a follower and tweet a message on their behalf. The tweet will be shared with the customer's followers and spread the desired content of the company.

Other ways to use similar tactics involve holding an Instagram hashtag contest where users are presented with a photo from the company and they have to come up with a creative hashtag to describe the picture. And another avenue would be a Facebook photo contest where users can upload their best photos representing the company and ultimately be chose to win a prize. All of these marketing techniques are used to draw people into the social arena of the company and hopefully convert them into sales. Understanding the use of social media tools and techniques like these will set businesses apart from the rest and develop relationships with their client base. After all, grounded relationships are integral to the success of a business.

Navigating the World of SEO

Scott Cowley, Stukent Expert

In a Stukent Expert Session Webinar, Scott Cowley goes into detail about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how to best utilize optimization techniques to build a profit. In a world where technology is a one stop shop for information, entertainment and shopping, having a website that is easy to find is extremely beneficial.

One of the first steps in building an optimized website is to learn and understand how people search and what they search for. There are 3 main types of searches; Informational, Navigational and Transactional. Within those 3 types of searches users are quite predictable in how they search. Most users want the search engine to do all the work for them, so when searching they may add descriptive keywords like, “Best” headphones or “Cheapest” headphones to bring up a more relevant webpage. Understanding this, will allow the web-builder to design web pages with keywords that will meet the search criteria of their target group.

According to Mr. Cowley, there are two parts to SEO, On-page SEO and Off-page SEO. On-page SEO is when a search engine such as Google, utilizes keywords on a webpage to determine the relevance of that webpage. Google’s algorithm will crawl the website and find keywords that are related to the search criteria and rank them higher due to relevancy. How to utilize keywords is a very complicated task. It is important to not oversaturate or cannibalize your site with keywords. Using too many keywords and using the same keywords will overcrowd and delegitimize your site. If everything is important, than nothing is important. Using tools like Google Adwords a data archive, can give insights on what people search for so a web builder can tailor the webpage to the search patterns of the consumer.

Courtesy: Marketing Comando

However, Google does not use relevancy alone to rank pages. Their algorithm also uses Off-page SEO, which ranks pages based on popularity. The popularity of a website can be determined by the number and quality of links that direct you to a particular web page. It is important to know that Google ranks web pages and not full web sites, so certain pages can have higher rankings than others.  Many businesses will use Social Media as a platform to put out content and generate traffic to a website in order to boost popularity. There are many techniques that can be used to generate traffic and if that technique is used in conjunction with keyword optimization it will yield the best search result placement.

Overall, SEO can be a powerful tool to market and communicate. What is important to know is that digital marketing is more than just having a web presence, but knowing how to use all of the tools and resources available to intentionally drive a message or conversion.