The Facts:

• 60% of your page rank is calculated by what others do in response to your site. Each click on those buttons generates a social page for your post, in turn generating a valuable inbound link from a very authoritative domain.
• Enabling your content to be shared across social media platforms, extends the reach of your content. This makes the money spent on creating content go further.

5 Tips to Optimize Your Website for Social Media

1. Group and Display your Social Media Icons Prominently

Icons linking to your social accounts should be displayed in the top-right corner of your home page for optimal visibility.

2. Feature Social Network Widgets in the Sidebar
  
Displaying Social widgets in your sidebar gives your customers an easy way to follow you with a single click. It also provides social proof by displaying how many followers or fans you have.

3. Display your Latest Tweets in the Sidebar

Entice the visitors to your website to join in the conversation by displaying your latest tweets in your sidebar or footer.

4. Display the Image Thumbnails of your Blogpost in the Sidebar

A picture is worth a thousand words. Include your blogposts image thumbnail on your blog post to generate interest in your blogs. While your at it, consider creating a unique thumbnail for each blogpost.

5. Display Social Media Sharing Buttons at the top or bottom of your Blogposts

Having social media sharing buttons clearly visible at the top (if not then on the bottom) of your blogposts and other content makes it easy for visitors to share your content and spread the word. These buttons usually have counters included, displaying how many people have shared your content. This serves as social proof of your content.

How do I calculate the return on Investment of my Social Media efforts?

Social Media is still a young and emerging discipline, but as a business function it needs to be justified with regards to the value it adds to your business against the cost in terms of time and money invested in maintaining your social media presence. Let’s take a look at two of the biggest myths surrounding Social Media and ROI.

Social Media Myths

MYTH No.1 - The ROI of Social Media cannot be determined, because you cannot place value on relationships
MYTH No.2 – Social Media is free

Many practicioners swear by these myths, but I disagree and here’s why:

DEBUNKED MYTH No.1 – The ROI of Social Media can be determined

While it is true that you cannot place a monetary value on social interaction and you cannot quantify the value of relationships, there still has to be a measure for your business to determine if getting involved in Social Media and your specific approach is worth while.

The truth is that to measure the ROI of Social Media, first you have to clearly define the goals for your involvement.

Possible goals for your business to engage in Social Media could be:

• Increase exposure
• Generate leads
• Increase site traffic
• Find new business partners
• Improve search engine rankings
• Reduce marketing expenses
• Close more business
• Improve brand awareness

Now, if your goal is to increase exposure, an increase in fans and followers could be your  ROI metric. You could also measure the success of your campaign by the amount of retweets and sharing of your content.

For a more sales focused campaign, perhaps your goal is to let others know about your new product and generate leads by driving traffic to the relevant product page on your website. Here traffic, leads (possibly measure by the amount of sign ups or completed Client Intake Forms) and conversion rate would be your metrics.

Determining what you want to achieve with Social Media is the first step towards determining the metrics you should use to calculate your ROI. Measuring a return on simply having a Facebook page or a Twitter account is rather pointless, but when engaging in a campaign on Social Media (such as promoting a new product) the goals of the campaign will inform the metrics for the ROI and should be measured.

DEBUNKED MYTH No.2 – Social Media is low cost, but not free
While it is true that anyone with a computer, tablet or mobile phone and an Internet connection can get involved with social media at no extra cost, it is not true that for a business there are no costs involved.

Being active, engaged and successful in using Social Media to achieve your business goals takes time, and time is money.

That’s right: Time = Money = Cost

This might not be a massive costs, and for many Social Media is a great low cost marketing channel. But the cost of time has to be factored into the calculation of the possible return.

If you are a professional Programmer, Illustrator or writer – any profession where you are paid for your services by the hour – then every hour spent on Social Media Marketing is an hour of productivity lost. Similarly if you are a manufacturer of goods – A furniture designer or a shoe maker – every hour spent on Social Media is an hour that could have been spent on creating or improving your products.
It is true that all that productivity would be pointless if you have no market, and that engaging with Social Media could create or help you find the market, but then the generation of leads will be your ROI metric and you would measure the value of the time spent on social media activity against the value of engaging with other marketing activities across other channels.

Your time is valuable and that means Social Media has a cost associated with it. Social Media might be a very low cost channel, but it is definitely not free.

Recommended reading:

For further insights into SM ROI take a look at these resources:

• A simple way to calculate Social Media Return on Investment
• 6 Social Media Success Metrics You Need to Track
• Measuring Social Media

What is Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public website and “tagging” them with keywords. It is defined by Wikipedia as a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet.

It differs from normal bookmarking in that your bookmarks are saved on a public website and can be seen by other users, allowing them to bookmark or share your links.

Social Media Examiner Report

Social Media Examiner published their 2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report in April 2011. It had some surprising findings with regards to Social Bookmarking as a tool in the Social Media marketer’s arsenal.

They surveyed more than 3300 social media marketers that provided insight into how they approach social media, the amount of time they spend on Social media marketing and what tools they use.

• Overall Social Bookmarking ranked third as the tool that marketers wanted to learn more about, topped by blogs and Facebook
• Interestingly, the longer the marketers were involved in social media marketing, the higher social bookmarking scored, with the experienced pro’s (ranked as marketers with over 3 years experience in Social media) rating it as the top tool that they want to learn more about.
• 40% of businesses plan on increasing their social bookmarking activities

Google’s Panda update and Social Bookmarking SEO

When Google rolled out the latest update to their search algorithm earlier this year, many Social Media Marketers saw their rankings crash and burn. Article directories and content farms were demoted in importance, and Google started tracking Social media links as a signal for SERP’s.

With a stronger focus on social media links, it is important to have your content spread across a variety of Social networks. Bookmark your own content and use social bookmarking buttons (Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Reddit) to enable your users to bookmark your content and share it with the world.

But be careful!

If you are doing a lot of bookmarking, restrain yourself from just bookmarking your own content. If you do, there is a chance that you will be detected as a “self promoter” and one or more of your accounts could be closed. Spread the love and bookmark other websites as you surf the internet. This will also make your profile more interesting to other users of Social Bookmarking sites and you can gain followers and build contacts with others that share your interests.

LightSpeed on Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking (Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon) definitely has it’s value, and we will be incorporating them in our Social Media Strategy in the near future. In the meantime, we will continue to create compelling content that garners interest, spread the word through our chosen channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and let others bookmark the  content if they should wish to do so.

Tell us about how you incorporate Social Bookmarking into your SEO and Social Media strategy by sounding of fin the comment section below.

For in depth guides on how to use some of the top Social bookmarking sites, check out these links:

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/stumbleupon-guide/
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-use-delicious-social-bookmarking/
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/new-digg-guide/

I was very buzzed for a good day of networking and insightful talks. Despite the very long queue to gain entry and the absence of free tea or coffee (Rather shocking, considering the price tag for this event), I was determined to have a good time. The list of Panelists included Kelvin Jonck of Cell C, Bellinda Carreira of Standard Bank and Patrick Kayton of Cognician. Their talks ranged from Social Media Monitoring and Strategy, Big business’ approach to Social Media and Social Media start-ups respectively.

The conference led to many insights into Social Media and how social media is being practiced in South Africa. I’ve already recapped some of the most profound lessons in our Social Media Strategy (Part 5) blog post, and for insight provided by others I suggest these blogs written by Anthony Coe and Darren Gilbert.

Social Media VS Traditional Media

One  of the most interesting insights gained at SMWF was that in the South African context, social media on it’s own is not enough, and it has to seamlessly integrate with what companies are already doing in other media. As Kemi Benjamin, Brand Manager at Nike said “Everything is not digital. Blend digital with physical.”

This is something that we have witnessed ourselves with one of our clients, Runner’s World. Runner’s World is a magazine aimed at runners and they have taken an integrated approach by driving their readers to their website with ads and articles pointing readers attention to extra content only available on their website. This has allowed  the magazine to leverage their existing readership and build a community around their publication online (With the help of BuddyPress)

Social Media and Mobile

We’ve blogged about the importance and the continued growth of the mobile web at length, here and here. The SMWF once again underscored the mobile web’s importance to the South African market with some interesting statistics:

SA is a Mobile first Market

• 12 million people are currently using the mobile web
• 6 million people are on the traditional web
• The projections for mobile web access in Africa are that it will double year on year
• 80% of status update for Facebook come from mobile platforms
• 91% of people keep their phones within a meters reach 24 hours a day
• The success of advertising on Facebook: In SAFM’s experience, 75% of their Facebook fans come from seeing a Facebook ad promoting their Page.

Mobile types

• Only 5% of cell phones in South Africa are smartphones
• Iphone accounts for 1% of emerging market phones
• Of the 4 Million smart phones in South Africa, half are Blackberry

It seems as though South African apps developers are focused on android first and Iphone second, but one has to wonder if their isn’t a market for Blackberry apps to make some money.

The Social Media World Forum was a good experience. It’s a bit over priced, had some hiccups (competing sound!) and  didn’t offer up any real surprises, but the value of meeting other social media practitioners and hearing their thoughts and insights cannot be over looked. Social Media is a continuously evolving industry and it is important for us serious practitioners to always stay abreast of the latest developments and do our research.

I’ll leave you with, for me, the most significant quote of SMWF 2011:

When it comes to Social Media, you must be prepared to learn, unlearn and relearn.

Changes in Social Media can be rapid, and in order to stay on top of your game you must be prepared to learn, unlearn and relearn.

Choosing a platform

Over the course of this blog series on LightSpeed’s Social Media Strategy I have highlighted certain aspects of our approach to the social media platforms that we have decided to actively engage with. These platforms are what we see as the big three: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Each of these platforms requires a unique understanding and offers its own advantages and disadvantages that need to be weighed and considered before you start to engage with their user base.

We have chosen these platforms based on their popularity, the fact that we were already there and that we are extracting value from them. But be warned: There are always new social network popping up, and the popular ones might not be the best for your business.

“You don’t pick which platform you should be on, your customers do.” – Nadia Boucher

Five steps to a Social Media Strategy

Coming up with a strategy for your business’ engagement with Social Media is of the utmost importance. You need a plan and set targets or else you are doomed to fail.

Mike Anderson of Meltwater Buzz shared his Five steps to building your own Social media strategy at the recent Social Media World Forum, and I’ve tweaked it a bit for our perspective:

• Step 1: Listen

They say all Social Media efforts should start with listening. Start listening to social media sites to find out where your customers are and what their needs are.

• Step 2: Define why

Ensure that you know why you are getting involved in social media and what you hope to achieve.

• Step 3: Strategize

Social Media platforms were not created equally. Choose  your channels and define measurable goals before you go to market. Remember that Content remains King and be sure that you have something to say.

• Step 4: Engage

Take action on your insight into your customers. Get involved with them, run campaigns and invite them to participate.

• Step 5: Measure your return on investment

When measuring the ROI of Social media campaigns don’t focus on the amount of followers and likes, but on how your efforts are helping you achieve business objectives.

Be Genuine

So now you have your shiny new Social Media Strategy in place and you feel that you are good to go. Just hold on before you jump online and get some buzz going. Remember that with Social Media it’s not really about you, it’s about your customers.

The tricky thing about Social Media is that you are sharing space with your customers’ friends and family, their real relationships with real meaning. People don’t really want to be marketed at and you don’t want to be the online version of a door-to-door salesman or an annoying telephone marketer. You should strive towards adding real value to the social spaces that you engage with.

Be truthful, be caring and be about the people.

Pieter du Toit of Social Media IQ said it best:

You don’t do Social Media, you become a social company.

Find us on your Favourite Social Platforms here:
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn

ADDED

Check out this slideshare presentation from the SMWF:

SMWF Meltwater Buzz & Cell C Present Social Media Monitoring for SM Strategy

LightSpeed’s LinkedIn profile page is an important part of our Social Media Strategy, and we’ve taken the following measures to improve it:

Networking

LinkedIn’s primary purpose is networking and your company’s LinkedIn profile will display all the information about your company from around the site. This includes links to the profiles of all current employees, former employees, new hires, and recent promotions.

Your employees connections have an influence on how well connected your company is, and their profiles do reflect back on your company. Keeping this in mind the first step for us was to get every team member to setup and improve their LinkedIn profiles. We also added LinkedIn icons to the individual Team member profiles on our Team page.

Recommendations

The recommendations feature on LinkedIn is one of those features that really sets it apart from the competition. Recommendations carry a lot of weight for potential customers and can often be the deciding factor when having to decide between service providers.

LightSpeed has been serious about collecting Testimonials from our clients since 2010 and we have placed a strong focus on these testimonials on our website, dedicating a page and a custom post type specifically to the goal of promoting our testimonials.

It is only a natural extension for us to now aim to connect with every new (and old!) customer on LinkedIN and to request a recommendation from them upon the successful completion of a project.

Interns

As mentioned in our post about our Facebook strategy, Interns make out an important part of our team.

We have decided to extend our view on recommendations to our Interns as well, requesting them to write recommendations on their time with LightSpeed and writing recommendations for them.

We will also be exploring the use of LinkedIN Jobs to post and promote our Internships in the future.

Blog and Twitter integration

Integrating your WordPress blog and Twitter account with your LinkedIn profile is easy.

LinkedIn allows you to import your WordPress blog posts into your profile page. This is great as it lets anyone that comes across your profile click directly to your most recent articles and  is an opportunity to show your expertise.  Setting this up is incredibly simple – just enter in the URL for your blog and it takes care of the rest.

We also display our most recent Tweets on our LinkedIn profile. Now potential clients can see the latest news from our company and it serves as a channel to promote our Twitter account.

LinkedIn is a great social network and in light of the strong performance of its shares after its recent IPO, it is clear that investors have a lot of confidence in its continued growth and development.

I hope that our approach to LinkedIn has provided some insight into what can be done on this platform, and sparked your interest in delving deeper into its functionality.

In the past we have maintained our own Twitter stream (@feedmymedia) and used it mostly as an observer, reading the tweets of the people we follow and using the service as a news filter to bring interesting news to us.

The strong feedback from our post on the Truth of Twitter in SA and insights gleaned from friends, colleagues and further research forced us to rethink the usefulness of Twitter and so we have decided to get more actively involved.

We defined these objectives for our Twitter account:

• Use Twitter as a listening channel. Twitter is great to ask questions and feedback from fellow Tweeps
• Extend the reach of our existing messages online. These messages include blog posts/news, our portfolio updates, Daily Tips, website updates, YouTube videos and relevant event attendance
• Provide an informal voice of LightSpeed and Feedmymedia to promote our company, share some behind the scenes stories (we have a lot of fun in and out the office) and building relationships
• Provide thought leadership and credibility, increasing our visibility as the experts in our field of expertise (WordPress) within the online space.
• Share cool stuff within our sphere of expertise with our followers. This includes retweeting interesting tweets and posting links to relevant news
• Provide an additional, low-barrier method for anyone to interact with LightSpeed and Feedmymedia to provide feedback, seek help and suggest ideas
• Monitor mentions on Twitter of our brand, engaging with our critics to resolve any problems or dissatisfaction, and with satisfied customers to thank them for and amplify their positive comments
• Provide live coverage of events (such as WordCamp, GeekDinner, Net Prophet) for those who cannot attend. We’ve recently covered the Net Prophet event a few weeks ago, and will be doing the same for the upcoming Social Media Forum Africa (1-2 June 2011)

The evolution of the Daily Tip

In the past we had an initiative to publish Daily Tips generated by our Team to showcase our expertise and share valuable resources. LightSpeed’s developers are top notch and we are actively involved with the development of other platforms, such as WP eCommerce.

Unfortunately writing these tips proved to be a big time suck for our development team. As a small studio tackling big projects (and kicking ass while at it) time is a very pricey commodity.

Often the tips were links to other sources, where our developers tracked down useful information that helped them solve problems. They also share useful tips on our internal project Blog, one of our main communication tools at LightSpeed.

This content proved to be better suited to Tweets. In this way we can still have the entire team participating in the conversation and we can continue to share our knowledge with our colleagues, friends in the industry and clients.

Twitter is a powerful communication and information filtering tool and a useful one to have in any business’s Social Media Arsenal. Best of all it’s free, and requires minimal effort to get started. Ignore it at your peril.

I hope this provides some insight into how you can use Twitter for your own business. For more inspiration, check out Chris Brogan’s excellent post on 50 Ideas on using Twitter for Business. It’s a bit old, but still so relevant he might as well have written it yesterday.

A brief overview of their findings gives me this impression:

Top Towns

Occupations and Interests

Emotions

What we talk about

Brands

Microblogging

Social Syndication

SMM vs SEO

It’s not a question of having either good SEO or a decent Social Media Marketing (SMM) strategy in place. You need both.

In the recent past, many former bloggers have been saying that blogging is dead. They have abandoned the act of blogging and moved on to the greener pastures offered by the likes of Twitter and Facebook. Social Media and mobile are the buzzwords and blogging is old news.

Frankly, I found this to be an absurd notion. Over the December holidays I encountered three people ranging from the ages of 25 to 56 who had just taken up blogging. They weren’t tech-savvy programmers but a lawyer, a student traveller and a house wife.

If they were taking the time to get into blogging, and for no immediate financial gain, surely blogging couldn’t be in it’s death throes. It seemed to me as though the whole “Death of Blogging” thing was nothing more than hype created to get some attention.

But suspecting wasn’t good enough. If I wanted to make a contradictory statement, I needed some proof.

The Quest for Statistics on the State of the South African Blogosphere

Finding any decent information on the South African Blogosphere proved very challenging. I contacted the Letterdash blogging platform – as part of News24 I am convinced that they must have a thriving community of bloggers – but their contact form was non existent with a 500 – Internal Server Error staring me in the face. Local Blog aggregator, Afrigator, also didn’t provide me with the information I needed.

I had no other choice but to turn to our friends, the Americans…

The Stats from the States

At a loss for finding statistics for our local scene, I consulted the excellent Technorati State of the Blogosphere Report published every year. Surely if blogging was in the decline, it would be visible in the USA first.

While this report doesn’t give a definite number to all the bloggers in the world, studying their methodology does yield an insight into the burning question of whether or not blogging is indeed still alive and well, kicking and with a pulse.

Technorati have an Internet survey conducted every year among bloggers nationwide. The survey group was shrunk from 2,828 bloggers in 2009 to 1,091 respondents in 2010.

However, the Report also uses data collected by Lijit, a trusted publisher network of over 12000 publishers and 700 million page views per month.

Lijit-collected data for the 2010 State of the Blogosphere report was from two primary sources.

• 13,000 active Lijit publishers that have the Lijit Search Widget installed on their blog (up from 11000 in 2009)
• The network of 3.8 million blogs that those 13,000 blogs connect to via their Blogroll and other social network connections tracked by Lijit (up from 2.5 million in 2009).

If Lijit could expand their survey group from 2009 to 2010 because they now have a larger pool of active users, then the Lijit data corroborates that Blogging isn’t dead and thriving still.

I’ll state that blogs have come of age. They have been around long enough to be effectively
assimilated by the mainstream. Blogs have gained legitimacy and are read by most internet users every day, in one form of another. The humble blog may not be the hotshot new kid on the block anymore, but it’s here to stay.

As Warren Ellis said in a recent Wired magazine column:
“When any medium starts getting “the death of…” articles, it doesn’t mean the medium in question is dying, so much as that people are bored with it and are looking for the next thing. And while they were looking for other things to be interested in, Chicago street gangs started blogging to protest against police harassment. Remember Blogger‘s original tagline? “Push-button publishing for the people.” That looks alive and well to me.”

Look out for the next post, where I will delve a bit deeper into the findings of the State of the Blogosphere Report and what it says about Microblogging and SEO.