Social Marketing should be a crucial part of your online marketing strategy

Published on May 06, 2010 Social Marketing should be a crucial part of your online marketing strategy

Popularity is everything when it comes to ranking your website and if you are selling online in a competitive industry like mobile phones or clothing, you need to be aware of the latest factors that are considered by the search engines.  These factors can make a difference to your website traffic, and therefore how much you sell online. Social marketing is more important than ever.

The growth in importance in social marketing is largely to do with the increased weight that search engines like Google are placing on links from social marketing websites like Blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Even if you are building a large number of links from these sites, the variety of sources is also becoming more important. So you can’t put all your eggs in one basket and rely on links from just Facebook or just Twitter. The more quality sources and quality links, the better.

5 DOs and DON’Ts for marketing your ecommerce shop online:

DOs for social websites:

• Write informative content that helps your target audience. For example, if you sell shoes, write about the latest trends in shoes, about how to find the perfect shoe, styles, materials, unusual shoes from around the world, sizing information, what shoes to wear to what occasion etc.
• Get links from multiple sources. Have your partners in related businesses write useful content for their customers that mentions you. This is like product cross selling for businesses. Another good way to do this is to write excellent product descriptions and use a shopping cart with social bookmarking link capability at the bottom of each product page.
• Post useful and helpful information on blogs and forums related to your industry to build rapport with other bloggers who might do the same for you.  Yes, there is karma in the online world!
• Ensure your helpful content are structured carefully. Google places more weight on the first 50 words in the body of your page than they do on the keywords “meta tag” that has historically been offered as the golden solution by some search engine marketing companies as the way to tell search engines about the content of your site
• Treat your online social marketing as seriously as your physical advertising.

DON’Ts for social websites:

• Don’t post the same content to multiple social bookmarking sites. You can pay freelancers to do this very cheaply but it is not an effective long term strategy and is increasingly viewed by search engines as social-spam.
• Don’t overtag your web pages and blog. If you do that you make it harder for your website visitors to search by tag (because they’ll get too many less relevant results for any given tag) and could be considered spam by search engines
• Don’t meaningless content that is stuffed full of keywords.  This happens by some websites in every industry – it gives them a short term boost in the search engines for a short time while the search engines are fooled. But search engines have tools to weed out this type of activity (it’s called keyword stuffing) and competitors will be quick to dob you in.
• Don’t promote your products directly on social bookmarking sites like Digg or del.icio.us. These sites treat this as commercial spam and this type of content is usually removed pretty quickly. Instead provide helpful useful content about the benefits of your products as content that will be attributed to you because of its use (see DOs section above).
• Don’t create multiple accounts yourself and use them to vote for yourself. Just like  you can’t go to multiple polling booths and vote for yourself on election day, you can’t do that online. That’s a quick way to get your website blacklisted for a long period of time on these social marketing websites.