Today's post is from our friend Jacob Morgan.Jacob Morgan is a social media consultant and runs a team of Technical SEOs. Jacob has founded a start-up in the social media space and has worked with brands such as Adobe, Conde Nast, Sandisk and Salesforce on creating search strategies. He is an avid and passionate blogger on all things social media and marketing related. He also loves meeting and building relationships with people so say hello and let him know if he can help you. You can connect with Jacob on: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Exposure is something that every business wants. If you’re Intel or the mom and pop shop on the corner you want exposure. The difference between these two examples is that Intel can play around with a lot more money…a lot! However, if you’re a small business you can still get a lot of exposure (or if you’re a mid/large business) without spending thousands of dollars. I will preface this by saying, it does take time and effort, but it can be done. This is a high level post of three core principles that you need to follow to get the job done. Here is what you need to do:
Exist
Simple right? You have to make sure that you exist online. At the very least you need to make sure that you are showing up in search results for your brand/company name. If you need a few quick tips to do this then read my quick and easy SEO tips for creating a:
These 3 simple things should get you to rank for your brand/company name (provided it’s unique, and yes there is a lot more you can do for SEO). The whole point behind existing is to create a “hub” for your company, a main central site a.k.a your website.
Spread
Now that you have a central site where people can come to find information about your product and services it’s time to expand out across the social web. This means joining sites like twitter, delicious, facebook, linkedin etc. This means creating a blog (if it’s relevant) where you can post information and build trust/authority in your niche. Don’t just go out there and join every and any social network you can find. Make sure you search those networks for relevancy. Use tools such as twitter search or google alerts to identify possible communities that may exist (or perhaps people that you can just reach out to).
You also have to remember to take the same trust and authority that you are trying to build on your main site and apply it to your “spreading” sites. This means providing quality valuable content across all of your channels, no spam, no junk, and no B.S.
Here are a few ideas to help you spread:
- Offer to write guest posts for other people (blogger outreach)
- Find people on linkedin that might be able to help spread the word (PR, journalists, etc.)
- Attend offline events that are relevant to your industry
- Encourage your users to help spread the word for you
- Make your content easily shareable (do you have links on your homepage to your social media profiles?)
Aggregate
Now that you exist and you have spread across the web it’s time to bring everything together to home base. The key for all of your social media efforts isn’t to get more friends on facebook or followers on twitter, the key is to get yourself exposure. This means sharing yourself across your social media channels and driving all of that traffic and community to your site.
Here are a few ideas to aggregate:
- Cross-link your social media profiles and site. This means put a link to your website in your twitter profile, put a link to your twitter profile on your facebook page, create an email signature with your links
- If you write a blog post then tweet about it and put it up on facebook (etc.) get the word out
- Once people visit your site you should provide an easy way for them to become repeat visitors. Offer an RSS subscription service and an email subscription service.
- Create a newsletter that will offer users unique content that only you offer
- If your community grows create your own ning site (free)
- Give your users the opportunity to guest post on your site
- Hold promotions or contests on your site (that you let people know about through your other social media sites).
This is obviously a large topic with a lot of room for expansion and discussion, but do what you can to follow these three principles and you should notice a strong increase in your site exposure. Have any other tips you want to share? Was this valuable to you?