But how do you actually know you are getting a good ROI for your social media campaign?

social media landscape

1. Traffic
Before you begin the social media campaign, make sure you record the number of visits to your site. If you have Google Analytics, you can export the traffic to your site and the key terms driving the most volume. You will see an increase in the amount of traffic during and after the social media campaign has finished.

2. Rankings
Measure your rankings weekly during the campaign. You should notice an improvement in the rankings as people are talking more about your site and your product.

3. Links
With an increase in the amount of buzz from the campaign, you should also see more links to your site. Make sure you record the number of inbound links before the campaign starts, this you can do by logging into your Google Webmaster tools.

You can easily measure the effects of social media if you are just working on that area of digital. It gets more difficult to relate the change in traffic, rankings and links when you are also running paid search, affiliates and off line advertising campaigns. However, you should consider social media as part of your integrated search and seo campaign. It is a growing area of digital and the effects it can have in terms of traffic and buzz to your site and around your brand can be phenomenal.

To make a good facebook page, optimised for both customers and seo, you need to get your fans talking about the brand and the experience.

The page needs to be kept fresh, full of relevant content and be kept active.

Here are a few tips:

• Relevant and timely content
• Special offers/ promo codes unique to facebook fans
• Ask your fans when you have a question – feedback is important
• Multimedia: add photos, videos, events
• Use facebook ads to drive new fans to your page
• Advertise by targeting your competitor’s fans
• Make it conversational, not salesy or spammy
• Use Facebook to build relationships with current customers, not to get new customers.

Optimising for seo

1.Choose the best name for your Facebook Page and stick to it.

Don’t put too many keywords in the title as it will be seen as spammy and will stop the viral growth of your Page.
Don’t make the facebook page too generic. Facebook want all pages to authentically represent business, brands or celebrity.

Use your business’s real name as the name of the Page.

2. Select the best URL (Facebook username) for your Facebook Page

The URL is one of the most important SEO opportunities on Facebook.
When you choose a Facebook username for your Page, your Page’s URL becomes www.facebook.com/YourUsernameHere. Facebook recently launched the ability to choose the vanity URL.

Once a username and URL is selected for your page, it cannot be changed, so choose wisely, use the business name with generic keywords which represent your company.

Facebook requires that your Page have at least 100 fans before it becomes eligible to select a username.

3. Use the “About” text box to place keyword-dense prose near the top of your Page

Place keyword-dense prose as close to the top of the Page as possible. There is a limit of 250 characters.

4. Include important keywords, priority links on the “Info” tab

Complete all the fields on the Info tab with keywords and links to other parts of the site. Make sure you also include your company address, company overview as this will all help to increase the content score of your Facebook Page for many types of Google searches.

Address, City, County, Post code are important fields for local searches

Company Overview, Mission, and Products are important fields for product searches

Make sure you choose the category that best suits your business as the different fields are dependent on the category.

5. Post direct links to your website (or other relevant sites) in your Page’s stream

Status updates are a great way to place direct links at the top of your Page’s structure and it can boost your Facebook Page’s link score.

There are two ways to put post links into your Page’s stream:

- Include the raw URL in the text of the status update itself

- Use the “attach link” feature in the Facebook publisher

6. Add photos with captions, events with descriptions, and a discussion forum

Always share interesting content on your Facebook Page.
Make sure that all photos and videos have titles and captions
When you post events, include text and keywords in the event description. Add a discussion forum to your Page.

7. Get more inbound links to your Facebook Page from the web

Post links to your Facebook Page on all your websites

The more inbound links you have to your Facebook Page, the more it will boost its PageRank.. You can do this with anchor text links and the “Find Us On Facebook” badge which it encourages Page owners to use.

8. Get more intra-Facebook inbound links from your fans

Facebook places links to Facebook Pages on the default version of Facebook users’ profile pages.
These links are visibile to search engines which is great for seo. The more fans you get, the more links you will have to your Page within Facebook.

And there you have it, a few tips to make sure you are top of the facebook search results and Google.

I work closely with social media who produce monitor the amount of online mentions or “buzz” for a particular brand. The seo guys use these buzz reports to see which bloggers and twitters are talking about the brands. The social media team contacts the bloggers but the seo team people give them the optimised content. This means that when the bloggers write about a particular product we have asked them to review they are linking back to our destinated web page on our key terms.

Facebook ties in with social media, but it also has an impact on seo. If your client wants to have a facebook page then they need to make sure it is optimised for seo. They must make sure that their key terms and links are on the facebook page and that they have an optimised URL.

Paid search and seo go hand in hand. By monitoring paid search adverts, we can see the number of impressions and click throughs for certain campaigns. If there is a high number of clicks on key terms and then we see through tracking that there is a high bounce rate, it may be that the landing page does not have enough content or that people cannot find what they are looking for. A new landing page will need to be created and the keywords that generated the highest CTR will be used in the page title, meta description and on page copy.

Another example of working together is when there is a brief for a new landing page to be built. Paid search will carry out keyword research to check the volumes around particular terms. This research can also feed into the seo recommendations.

The next time a client asks you just to do their paid search for them, look at their site and see if they have optimised it for seo. If they have not, show them the great opportunities there are with the integrated search strategy.

Integration is the key to unlocking traffic and high rankings.

It was registered on February 14th, 2005 and has grown so fast in the past 5 years. It serves more than 2 billion videos per day. That is the equivalent of every person in the world watching 10 videos per month, or according to YouTube is nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined.

YouTube turns 5

There were other competitors to YouTube, there were services such as Veoh, Vimeo and Viddler and many more. But it was YouTube that came through and 19 months after setting up the company, it was bought by Google in October 2006 for $1.65 billion. Not bad for a couple of Paypal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim.

Check out YouTube’s blog for the “My YouTube Story” which has tales by people around the world describing how YouTube has changed their lives.

Anyone can broadcast yourself on YouTube, politicians, students, even brides and grooms from their wedding videos. My favourite has to be the Wedding First Dance – Baby Got Back . That has been viewed over 12 million times. They are stars in their own right. and many unknown joblogs have used YouTube to show off their talent (Justin Bieber) or show their odd family videos. YouTube was started to give bloggers an easy way to put their videos in their blogs and has expanded ever since. Apparently 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute. YouTube also has content deals with more than 10,000 partners including entertainment titan Disney, and has a fledgling online movie rental service.

It will be interesting to see how much YouTube develops in the next five years especially now that is is part of Google’s “media cloud” for people to access films, books, magazines, tv shows old and new. YouTube will go from strength to strength and who knows how much the video search landscape will have changed when we celebrate its tenth birthday?

Michael Acton Smith set up the social networking site for kids in 2004. Last week it reached 15 million members, and according to Hitwise is the quickest growing site online. It is now one of the biggest sites for children.

Welcome to Moshi Monsters

Children login to the site and adopt a monster which they create from 1 of 6 basic designs. Each monster has name and the children can choose the colour of their own little monster. The graphics are amazing as well, you can tell the founder was inspired by Pixar.

Parents do not have to worry about their children on this site as privacy is very important and users are unable to post photos and send messages. Conversations are also monitored and filtered. I was really impressed with the terms and conditions for the site. Everyone has to accept these before they are allowed to enter the site and play games.

Rules for Moshi

The monster has to be regularly fed and interacts with others in the virtual town. Users can also get virtual pets called “moshlings”. You can get your own moshling by planting the right combination of seeds. You can learn online, maths puzzels, spelling and play games, all for free. The site is educational, perhaps the 21st century edition of Sesame Street. The kids come from all over the world with a third coming from the UK and the US. It was originally aimed for 7 – 11 year olds but now there are players as young as 3 years old. The site is all about learning and where kids can be kids.

Last year the number of visits to the site grew by 424% and this year it is set to grow even more. Michael Acton Smith has signed a book deal for Christmas and has licensed the track “Hey Mickey” for “Hey Moshi”. 2010 is set to be the year for Moshi Monsters.

For more information, please read the feature from the Evening Standard.

Google Buzz

According to the guardian, Buzz has been rolled out to all of Gmail’s 150 million users worldwide, though not yet to those using Gmail inside organisations, where it is expected to arrive next month.

When it was being tested internally, it was called Taco Town, and proved popular for sharing high-definition videos, said Hugo Barra, a product manager. “Google is really good at sorting information,” he said. “That’s what we intend to do with social information as well.” Some critics say this is Google’s attempt at twitter and it is not really offering anything new and exciting. However, if Buzz were to be used by all Gmail users, then it would have more users than MySpace. Facebook is currently the number 1 social networking site with 400 million users.

But what about mobiles? Well it does not work on all mobile phones yet, just the iPhone and the Google Nexus. I am sure Google is working on making sure Buzz is available on more handsets.

So how will Google compete in an already saturated market place? Apparently, Google already tried to build social networking systems before. In 2004, it launched a Facebook like site called Orkut and successful in Brazil. Google bought Jaiku in 2007, a Twitter-like system but was abandoned by the company in January 2009.

According to techradar , Yahoo and Microsoft already offered similar services. Yahoo launched http://buzz.yahoo.com/ two years ago. And Microsoft say their Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.

It seems like Google have copied the name from Yahoo and the idea from facebook and twitter without offering anything new. It will be interesting to see if Google can make Buzz work.

This was sent out to Vodafone’s 8,663 followers. Vodafone has since apologised to its followers and says the employee in question has been suspended.

Vodafone are not the first company to be embarrased by their twitter account

Habitat returned to Twitter in September last year with a message, “We’re back. Sorry it took so long. This time we want to get it rightt. Tell us what you want to hear from us and we’ll mark suggestions in our favourites.”

Habitat was criticised for using Twitter site to spam the community back in June. It used hash tags, which help users track conversations on the microblogging site, to promote marketing messages that had no relevance to the topics used. Habitat’s defence was that the campaign was a mistake and the posts were made by an intern.

However, HabitatUK, was putting out marketing messages such as ‘Our totally desirable Spring collection now has 20% off!’ on Friday, using tags such as #mms, #Apple, #iPhone and even used an Iranian election hashtag #Mousavi.

Although all the messages were replaced with sales and marketing tweets, the damage had already been done. Many Twitters already saw the messages and tweeted their annoyance.

This is a classic example of how a big brand such as Habitat was unable to execute a social media idea successfully. They jumped on the twitter band wagon too soon without truly understanding the full damage it could do if implemented incorrectly.

This past week it was Wallace and Gromit’s 20th birthday and google had a team party image of them. It has also been Sesame Street’s 40th birthday and the rest of the week has seen images of different sesame characters on google’s home page. My favourite is the one with Elmo as below.

Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?

Sesame Street was set up in 1969 by the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) aimed to help all kids especially those that were from poor neighbourhoods to learn and prepare for school. The use of television for educational purposes had not been a proven tool before this time and Sesame street was ahead of its time promoting values we take for granted now. Some of these values were that everyone is created equal, accepting people from different racial backgrounds and not making assumptions based on gender. The show integrated muppets and people from different racial groups.

According to reuters to celebrate its 40th anniversary, Michelle Obama will appear on Sesame Street on November 10th. This will probably be the episode shown in the US and will be aired in the UK after.

Sesame's Count loves counting

Cookie monster says share

I found this interactive social networking map, so you can see which countries use which social networking sites.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/07/a-map-of-social-network-dominance/

All the light green countries belong to Facebook. But there are still resisitance from some countries such as Russia (where V Kontakte dominates), China (QQ), Brazil and India (Orkut), Central America, Peru, Mongolia, and Thailand (hi5), South Korea (Cyworld), Japan (Mixi), the Middle East (Maktoob), and the Philippines (Friendster).

Another report I found shows how popular social media has become. They even boost it has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the Web. Facebook has been compared to a country, saying it would be the world’s fourth largest, behind the USA and Indonesia, simply because of the number of registered users. Facebook which once started just for college graudates now has growing segment, the 55 – 65 year old females. This is mainly due to these women wanting to keep in touch with their children and now grandchildren. Another interesting fact about facebook is that more than 1.5 million pieces of content (Web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on facebook daily. So who needs encylopedias now?

I am not going to take the credit for this, so if you want to find out more, please visit http://searchenginewatch.com/3634651

Facebook is one of the major reasons people are spending more time online. People in the UK spend a total of 22 hours and 20 minutes online which is up on 34% a year ago. (April 2008 – April 2009) However, facebook recorded people spending 3.8billion more minutes in April this year than April 2008

The most heavily used web brands are those in the communication and entertainment industry. Hotmail’s instant messenger has people hooked for hours online, chatting away to friends or sending work files to colleagues. YouTube is the entertainment channel for most users online, allowing those to search for quirky videos or funny clips.

The 10 most heavily used brands online are the following:
1 Facebook
2 MSN/Windows Live
3 Google
4 eBay
5 Yahoo!
6 AOL Media Network
7 BBC
8 YouTube
9 Microsoft
10 Apple