5 Questions to Ask, Before Jumping Into a New Social Media Other than Facebook

New social networks are always popping up on a regular basis, and one of the true facts is that these specialized communities don’t have Facebook’s 800 million users. That doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t great places for brands to be. In many cases, brands are adopting niche social networks based on the quality of interactions as opposed to broad-based reach and are reaping the benefits.

Some of the rising social networks include Pinterest, Houzz, Tumblr, Instagram, GetGlue, IntoNow, PlayUp etc… Each of these networks courts a different demographic and audience, and each offers unique ways to share content like photos, links, and comments.

But remember, brands shouldn’t rush to create pages or advertise on these social networks, even if the audience seems like a perfect fit. To take full advantage of focused social networks, it pays to create specific engagement programs for each community.

Before taking the plunge on smaller social networks, marketers have to take a chance to ask these below five questions:

1. Is there at least one Target Audience?

When you have a goal to engage with potential clients and customers, then the quality and focus of the social network members are critical. So you have to do a bit research and make sure your target audiences are represented on the social network.

2. How much Time will you need?

When you begin connecting with a new community; remember that you are building out your brand page/presence as well as daily community management task for your new community, so think about how much time you’ll need to get connected.

Approximately you will need 10-12 hours to create new assets, crafts messaging specific to the channel and deploy the new presence. Where else ongoing community management will vary depending on how active you want to be on the new network.

3. How will use the New Channel?

Think about the following questions before using the new channel:

1. Will you have presence on a new social network to promote one aspect of your business?

2. Will the network be a place for you to ask for product feedback?

3. Will there be place for consumers to take part in the development cycle? etc…

Instead you can use the new social channel to build your brand reach in a global way. With board-based communities like Pinterest, brands which are simply showcasing their brand voice through images and ideas bring users closer to the brand.

4. How to work on the progress for Success?

Setting specific engagement goals for each social network is critical. But by setting short-term, growth related goals at the onset; you can more easily manage for success.

Remember these are new communities for you, so you can’t see huge brand sales or sales impact right away. So the community has to grow and get matured as well as your metrics and goals. Map out specific goal for engagement user action, sharing metrics, etc…

5. Where will this channel be after Two Years?

There are plenty and plenty of social media futurists out there; but no one can assure whether a social network will stick around in consumer’s heart and mind for the long haul.

First take some time to map out which feature you hope the channel will add in the next two years such as new functionalities, enhancement to usability, and new marketing and advertising methods, and whether this meets your brand requirements accordingly. Maybe the communities might never deliver these but create a “wish list” instead.

It will help you to assess whether your network is delivering the feature that matters to your brand now and down the line.

Summary:

The newest social networks always look shiny and new, but the real goal for brands is to participate in niche communities to reach specific, engaged audiences. By asking these above few questions you can engage with a new network, and you can bring a little strategy and structure to your social marketing strategy. Good Luck!

Optimizing: 3 Types of Content with 3 Different Media

Everybody’s primary goal in search optimization is to get their own site’s content to rank first or closer to first rank for specific keywords. If, however, you are having trouble doing that the following ideas will help you, but just make sure that the content is branded well enough so people know who to credit for it.

We are going to see how:

* SEO Title,

* Meta Description,

* Meta Keywords, and

* H1 Tags — are going to work with 1.YouTube Videos, 2. Slide Share Presentations, and 3. Flickr Photos, with a stronger domain authority.

1. YouTube Videos:

YouTube is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos. YouTube is a web-service that allows anybody to post their video files and share them with other people. It is owned by Google; hence videos are well ranked in search results. The following parts of YouTube details are used for the video page’s SEO optimization.

* SEO Title: The most important SEO element in your video pages is the ‘Video Title’. This is where you will want your brand name and keywords if you can fit them both together. You Tube will append – YouTube to the end of the title.

* Meta Description: Your video page’s Meta Description will be taken from your video description. Doing this is little tricky as some people like to include their link first to get clicks from their videos to their website. But if you can include that along with a keyword enhanced description within 160 characters you’re all set & ready.

* Meta Keyword: Google may not much care about of Meta Keywords, but be sure to use them at least just for an enhancement. The tags of your video are used as the Meta keyword for the video page. YouTube separates keyword phrases by space & not comma, so be careful to put the quotes around a keyword phrase.

* H1 Tag: Your title will be again used in H1 tags by YouTube.

Don’t forget to use the YouTube’s own keyword tool for keyword ideas based on video search.

2. SlideShare Presentation:

SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. With 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million page views, it is one among the most visited 200 websites in the world. Besides presentations, SlideShare also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars. Have you got any Power Point Presentation that you could like to share from webinars, seminars etc…? This Slide Share will help you, & the following will help you optimize those presentations for search.

* SEO Title: The SEO title for your presentation page is simply the title of your presentation. You can completely use the 70 characters as your desire because SlideShare doesn’t append their name to the title. You can use up to 3,000 characters, but only the first160 characters will count.

* Meta Description: The Meta Description for your presentation page is the presentation’s description.

* Meta Keyword: Meta Keywords for your presentation pages are derived from the presentation tag that you enter. The limit is only up to 20.

* H1 Tag: SlideShare will use your presentation’s title in H1 tag also.

Although the links do not count for SEO value, you can include links in your PowerPoint presentation so that people can click it while viewing your presentation on SlideShare. Be sure to include those to get traffic back to your website.

3. Flickr Photos:

Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. Show off your favorite photos and videos to the world. Flickr is home to over five billion of the world’s photos. Flickr is always in your back pocket with apps for iPhone, Windows 7, Android, and more. Popping up in image search results can be a powerful way to generate traffic, and one of the top image networks is easily Flickr. Below is how to optimize your images for SEO and traffic generation back to your website.

* SEO Title: Your image page’s SEO title will be used as the title of your image. Flickr will append – Flickr to the end of the title.

* Meta Description: Your video page’s Meta Description will be taken from your video description. The image description is a great place to add your link; you can use anchor text to come back from the link to your website.

* Meta Keyword: The Meta Keyword is derived from the image tags itself. These tags also helps users search for images on Flickr, so be sure to add some good photos.

* H1 Tags: Flickr will be using your image title again in H1 tags.

If you want to use your images for link building, then upload them with Creative Commons rights, and in your image description after the first 160 characters, note that anyone can use the image freely if they link back to your website using the following link and anchor text. It can be a great way to share images that bloggers might use in their posts, infographics, etc…

“Have a Nice Day”