How Small Businesses Can Integrate SEO Into Their Social Media Efforts

Integrating SEO with your social media strategy isn’t just something you should “think” about doing. Optimizing your social media efforts so that both search engines and social community members can find your content is essential if you’re going to have any chance at success and for your own efforts to get the “credit” rather than another company or individual.
Take for example last year’s viral video of the man with the “Golden Voice.” I wrote about this in depth, but in essence, had the newspaper who originally found this man paid attention to optimizing their content along with allowing it to be shared, they would have gotten the millions of views, plus the notoriety that came along with finding the man and becoming the authority on the subject, not MSNBC’s Today Show or YouTube.

Your company doesn’t have to have hundreds of thousands of dollars set aside to integrate search engine optimization into your social media efforts. Any small business can make sure they’re taking the essential steps that will help their content get the traction it needs. The key to making sure that your content is optimized is two-part. First, optimizing for how people search when they go to a search engine like Google or Bing, and second, optimizing for how people search when they go to a social networking community like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.
Read more: ClickZ
Key Findings in Audience Efficiency
I spoke the other week at AdMonsters OPS Markets London on the subject of audience efficiency. This is a methodology both to evaluate individual segments relative to a target audience, usually client converters or visitors, and the most efficient way to describe that target. We posted a preliminary piece on this very site. I offered five key findings based on more than 200 client models in my presentation and want to share three of those findings, and their implications, here.

A Reminder on Audience Efficiency

We can visualise audience efficiency as a tradeoff between how well an audience segment fits a client’s target audience (lift) and the reach. Mathematically, there is no possible selection of audiences that provides the same lift for a given reach or vice versa.

Third-Party Audiences Aren’t Efficient on Their Own

In this luxury auto manufacturer example we see that different third parties have radically different audience efficiency characteristics. At one extreme, we see that partner 2 has very high lift but very low reach. Partner 2’s total audience reach is higher than this, of course, but these are the only segments that show up as statistically relevant to this client target. At the other extreme, we see that partner 5 has very low lift, just 1 to 2 times the network average, though with very high reach.
Read more: admonsters

As mentioned in a recent article on the top five ad formats that will boost your brand, comScore asserts that the creative has four times the impact on results as the media plan does. An analysis of 400 campaigns indicates that the creatives contributed to 52 percent of the overall results, while the media plan contributed to just 13 percent.

Choosing the correct ad format can definitely boost your brand, but there’s a lot to be said for good ideas, regardless of how they are delivered.

Here are some compelling creative ideas that you can put into action to drive engagement and make the user experience more memorable. Example campaigns have been mainly drawn from last year’s MediaMind Rich Media award submissions.

Change up the standard interaction rules As the world becomes much more touch-centric, the same old point-and-click can start to drag a bit. If you can show your users a bit of non-standard interaction love, it’s hard to for them to resist at least trying it out.
read more: iMEDIACONNECTION
Grow Your Revenue Faster: How to Efficiently Engage More Buyers
Today’s business challenges are largely focused on marketing – how are you presenting your products at the time prospective buyers start looking? And where are your buyers looking for information about what products to buy?

The answer is: primarily through Internet searches and their social networks. Whether you are marketing to other businesses or to consumers, customers’ preferences are established way before they talk with your salespeople. How do your marketing people ensure that your products are being considered as early in the buying process as possible and with the best possible information?
How are the most advanced companies evolving their marketing and sales teams into the new world so they beat their competition like a drum? The answer starts with a clear and expanded role for marketing, promoting products and services where your buyers are figuring out what to buy, and aligning marketing with sales so your teams leverage each other to maximize productivity and teamwork – it’s a matter of life and death for your company. Sound revolutionary? Not really.

There are five steps to maximize revenue growth today. I assure you the results can be stunning:

1.Show up early and often. Engage prospective buyers the instant they start looking for your kinds of products. Leverage PPC, SEO, digital advertising, and partnerships that lead prospective buyers to your website – and custom landing pages so 100 percent of your prospective buyers are now engaged with your company in a way that’s better than your competition.

2.Develop trust; content is king. Marketing must develop prospective customers’ interest by sharing white papers and educating prospective customers about what’s possible using your products (versus your competition) via a highly evolved website that’s chock-full of valuable content that you share with prospective buyers so you earn their trust and respect.
Read more: ClickZ

Can Location-Based Social Networks Reach the Masses?

In today’s online world, mass can be reached in months, not years. For proof, all you have to do is look at Pinterest’s explosion over the last six months, becoming the fastest standalone site to surpass the 10 million unique monthly visitors mark.
So why haven’t location-based social networks had this kind of explosive growth? After all, services like Foursquare and Gowalla have both been highly regarded and used by digital early adopters. Facebook even tried to launch its Places functionality as a standalone piece before folding it into the status update feature. Interestingly, Facebook places so much importance on this functionality that even after it shut down Places, it purchased Gowalla for its developer expertise. All social networks would love to have the size and engagement rates that Facebook receives, with a user base of 850 million and an average spent time in January 2012 of 405 minutes.

However, location-based services are dependent on smartphone penetration. Yes, people can use tablets for these services, but I think we can all agree that the majority of activity will be on smartphones. If we look at smartphone penetration according to the International Telecommunication Union (November 2011), there were an estimated 1.186 billion global active broadband subscribers in 2011, and 796 million smartphones have been sold in just the last two years according to IDC (Feb 2012).
Read more: ClickZ
Pubmatic Acquires MobiPrimo, Integrates Mobile Into Ad Platform
As hot for mobile as its publisher clients, PubMatic just announced the acquisition of MobiPrimo. An established mobile development technology firm, MobiPrimo clients include Nokia, Motorola and Microsoft. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Per the deal, PubMatic is planning to integrate the mobile platform with top mobile networks, ad servers and demand-side platforms.

“Integrating mobile into our platform simplifies a previously complex effort,” said Josh Wetzel, vice president of mobile at PubMatic. “Now, we’re giving publishers a single platform.”

Mobile or otherwise, PubMatic needs every edge it can get. According to 34 distinct criteria, Forrester recently deemed AppNexus and Admeld to be superior sell-side platforms.

PubMatic and Rubicon Project were both recognized by Forrester as strong competitors in the sell-side space, and credited search for aggressively ramping up their development efforts, as well as turning once-distinguishing platform features into standard offerings.

Read more: MediaPost