Social Media Programs Archives - Florida Strategic Consulting

2018 Social Media Strategy Overview

Posted on April 30, 2018 by Alex M. Hochberger, MBA

There is no one side fits all strategy to Social Media, but ignore it at your risk. There are several major platforms and a plethora of minor platforms, but for small business brands and political brands, there are a few to focus on. Thank you to Pew Research for putting these facts together.

YouTube

YouTube, by reputation, is that of a video streaming service, but the YouTube.com site is a much broader social platform. Comments, discussions, sharing, and thumb up/thumb down scores all contribute to the YouTube experience. Sure you can embed a YouTube video on your website without using those functions, but YouTube.com is now the second largest search engine (after Google.com), and Google Video searches rely heavily on YouTube. A strong YouTube presence, including the social components of commenting on related videos and replying to comments, is very important. As of January 2018, 73% of Adults use YouTube.

Facebook

The largest of the pure Social Platforms, 68% of Americans have Facebook Accounts. Only Facebook knows what percentage of them are regular and active users, but Pew pegs it at 74% of American Facebook users use it at least once a day. That’s self reported, so take it with a grain of salt, but Facebook may be the easiest and most direct way to reach people. It is not sufficient to have a Page that you share content to. Links to your website, with proper boosts, and audience building campaigns are critical to brands having the ability to engage with people that interest them.

Instagram

Instagram, the Facebook property, is in third place with 35% of Americans having accounts, 60% of whom use it at least daily. That makes Instagram an important, but not as critical, part of your social media strategy. A simple Instagram account, with a regular picture and caption being added, with good hashtags, can go a long way towards building your brand. A serious effort to build followers and engage can have more serious results, but it depends on your brand. If your goal is to build deep relationships with users (premium luxury brands), Instagram should be front and center. If you need a more casual relationship with the bulk of the population (think politicians, Instagram can be more perfunctory).

Niche Platforms: Pinterest, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter

These platforms, are relatively popular, all having a decent population, with dominance in their area, but lack a universal presence. The usage gap between these platforms and Instagram is only a few percentage points, but Instagram is rapidly growing and these niche platforms are relatively static in their user base. For completeness, Pinterest has 29% of Americans, Snapchat 27% of Americans, LinkedIn has 25%, and Twitter 24%. These aren’t small audiences, with large segments of the population in their niche.

Pinterest is very popular, but is demographic specific, being 81% female, and a median age of 40. The active pinners are younger and even more female, and among Millenials it equals Instagram. It has a strong advertising platform, and is very strong around lifestyle, hobbies, and brands. If you market your brands towards women under 50, Pinterest is a great addition to your platform. (OmniCore’s Pinterest Statistics)

Snapchat is popular, but niche. The advertising platform is immature, and it is challenging for non-celebrities to build a following here. Unless you are in fashion, music, or other youth targeted segments, it is probably more worthwhile to focus on other platforms. But if you are targeting college students and younger, SnapChat is essentials. (OmniCore’s Snapchat Statistics)

LinkedIn is a valuable, and expensive to market on. If your target audience are business professionals, it’s a critical platform. Sales Professionals live and die by LinkedIn. Gainfully employed people may only look at Linkedin when job hunting. If you are selling into corporate markets, LinkedIn needs to fit your platform. If you are marketing to consumers, LinkedIn is probably not going to generate an ROI.

Twitter is a super strange platform. It’s relatively small, but sometimes has an out-sized influence. It is popularly credited by the media with dominating the 2016 election, but there are so few people on it. It is more popular overseas, where the lower data needs and more free-flowing conversations avoid censors. Twitter is extremely possible with journalists, public relations firms, and celebrities. The ability to run the messaging from a cell phone makes it much flexible for those in the business of communicating with those industries. While Twitter shows Videos and Images, pure text messaging still works. If your business is looking to reach journalists, generate publicity, or communicate with customers in a free-wheeling fashion, Twitter should be part of your communications strategy. Twitter’s advertising tools are shockingly primitive, but it’s very powerful if you are trying to reach the demographics active there.

2016: Convergence of Social and SEO

Posted on November 22, 2016 by Alex M. Hochberger, MBA

The last few years have seen major changes in trends for Internet traffic. Social has exploded in importance, driving more traffic than search. How marketers adapt has been interesting.

Until this year, companies could run their social media and content marketing operations separately. Social media focused on brand engagement, content and SEO teams focused on driving eyeballs to the site. In 2015, Google and Twitter’s deal came to fruition. Additionally in 2015, Google’s Google+ Service got integrated as Google Local. In 2015, these were add-ons, throughout 2016, the integration moved to the core of the system.

So what changed in 2016?

Semantic Web Became Real
Mobile-Optimized HTML (AMP, Facebook Instant Pages)
Video Came of Age

The Semantic Web was of academic interest until it exploded with social in the past year. Open Graph and Twitter Cards became “must have” features as the social media networks gave prominence to links with content instead of merely including pictures. As sites were updating to support these additions to HTML, supporting the Semantic Web just made sense.

Mobile-Optimized HTML dealt with the reality that Mobile Responsive wasn’t enough, with increasing mobile bandwidth, slow speeds and high latency were an issue. Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages and Facebook Instant Pages have a shared core to deploy a cache-able stream-lined version of the website, feeding both social efforts and search efforts.

Every year has been the “year of video,” but 2016 really took off. YouTube’s social integration with Google+ and enhancement of their social features really pushed Video to the forefront. Pre-loading video on Facebook made including video critical to engagement, and the Video Advertising space heated up.

If you are still looking at SEO as something you should do (instead of building into your site structure) and Social Media as something else, you need to rethink that for 2017. In 2017, all methods of interaction are becoming unified, and you should plan to engage in SEO, Remarketing, and Social Media as a unified structure.

Social Search – Critical for Time Sensitive Programs

Posted on October 28, 2009 by Alex M. Hochberger, MBA

Bing and Google announced deals with Twitter to access and utilize their data, and Search Insider is discussing the first impacts of this. What’s most interesting is that this might be the first major change since “FreshBot” was added to Google (and later became the primary crawler). Old hand SEOs remember the crazy update schedules of the early engines, but Google’s monthly “Google Dance” as their crawler finished and about a week later the PageRank was computed and the new index went up across their data centers. Google started crawling and updating with “fresh” data (tagged with the data) with a guestimated PageRank for placement, and as they got faster at computing changes across the Internet, these Fresh results were no longer being inserted, they were the results.

Twitter has a disproportionate presence in media circles and other influential areas. Twitter data, including trends, what people are talking about, etc., provides a view into what is new and what is going on. While news feeds capture the mainstream coverage, Twitter will know what is news to the Internet. This powerful medium helps determine if you are dealing with a “Google Bomb” or a bona fide story. While Google originally assumed if people linked to you, like a citation in Academia, that made you authoritative, but only a select subset of the population had websites. Blogs were more common than a full site, but Twitter is even more available to anyone. Link and information trading on Twitter happens faster than someone writing a blog post, let along researching a news story, so Twitter gives a view into what is happening now.

This is an exciting time in search. Twitter data will make it even more exciting.

Launch a business with Social Media and SEO in 5 Steps

Posted on September 10, 2009September 10, 2009 by Alex M. Hochberger, MBA

So I routinely get asked by friends for advice on how to get a web business launched with no money. As I politely steer them away from the idea that I should do it for them, I thought that I should work on a basic guide for getting started.

Step 1: Pick a Good Domain Name

A domain name is your address, what you will hand out, and what you will advertise. Your goals are short, easy to spell, nothing to trip people up, and keyword friendly. If you are dealing with cars in Florida, and your name is Jake, then CarsByJake.com would be friendly, start with your keyword, and be easy to spell. FloridaCarsByJake.com would also be good, but JakesFloridaCars.com gets tricky because without the appostrophy, it sounds like your name is Jakes. Avoid double consonants (two words, one that ends in a letter and the next work begins with it), and definitely do no “merge” it being clever, people will get confused. I find dot-com extensions better than alternatives, but it may depend on your industry. It’s been over 10 years since dot-net was the premium TLD and dot-com a negative one, but dot-net still has cachet in technology sectors.

Step 2: Register with Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

You don’t get to play if you aren’t there. Twitter is important for the ability to move information out there. Facebook has a tremendous number of users and viral power, and LinkedIn is where the professionals hang out. While you may not use all these mediums terribly effectively on Day 1, the sooner you open an account, the sooner you are ready to use it. If you aren’t going to optimize for all platforms, also register with Ping.fm or HelloTXT for content syndication, that will let you move your messages to all platforms at once. I would recommend picking a URL shortener for social media (I use Bit.ly) and creating an account with stats, this way you can keep your collection of short links and start to see what drives traffic. For Facebook, you should also setup a Page for your business so people that like your business can Fan your Page, even if they don’t know you personally.

Step 3: Setup the Website and add Content

If you aren’t ready for a serious commitment, using a free CMS system like WordPress.com, or other environment that let’s you publish and bring your own domain name is important. Make certain that you can export content later if you move. Despite my historically building my own CMS platforms for SEO reasons, I’ve been finding WordPress.com a great platform for self-publishing, and I can always export to a WordPress.org (self hosted) system later and work from there into whatever I want. Good content is key to success. Learning to write 5+ blog posts a week plus updating the core of the site (Pages in WordPress speak, the static content part of any CMS) of information, adding images, etc., is time consuming.

Step 4: Get in the Social Media World and Blogosphere

You need to participate to get involved. For Facebook, setup the appropriate privacy policies and participate in comments, Wall Posts and pictures. Wish people well on their birthday, tell them when they put up cute pictures of children/grandchildren, be friends with your friends. For Twitter, grab TweetDeck, start finding the appropriate Hashtags for your discussions and start sharing information. With your blog, find bloggers posting questions that you can answer, and either leave a comment (if short), or answer with a link to their entry with software that will ping them with the answer. Like any form of networking, participate. Retweet good posts, share your expertise, and build up an online reputation.

Step 5: Using Content and Social Media, Promote your Site which Promotes your Business

This final step is how you pull it all together. Write good content for your site on the blog, promote it through your new Social Media channels. The better the content, the more likely you are to get Retweeted or linked to from other blogs. The more links you get to your site, the better you will do in search engines. The more you get Retweeted in Twitter, the more likely you are to get Followers. The more you get mentions and links on Facebook on news feed, the more likely you are to reconnect with friends or come to the attention of customers. SEO = keywords + good content + links… the more advanced part of SEO, you can get to that later, when you get traction. If you need to hire an SEO expert, you will already have new customers from your web site plus a great starting point for the SEO who can see your keyword success to get started. As you add content and social connections, your traffic will build and build, and if your site’s core information is good, you will successfully launch your business.

This is my first draft of this 5 Step Process. I expect to come back and revise over time. Comments, suggestions, etc. are all appreciated. Feel free to Follow me on Twitter and Tweet this Post!

SEO Friendly Content: The Holistic Approach to Web Design

Posted on September 4, 2009September 7, 2009 by Alex M. Hochberger, MBA

When I started in SEO, everyone wanted a silver bullet. As the years passed, people still want a silver bullet, but more and more clients and companies realize that SEO is part of the web site design process, not a bolt on service. Sure you can do bolt-on SEO spamming, but it’s really expensive, time consuming, and only worthwhile for very wealthy companies in hyper competitive areas.

I saw another business blogger talking about Promoting Your Business For Free, and there is a discussion of business tools like blogs and press releases, and using social media to get word out, but not a word about SEO. What’s a shame is every piece of advice he has on that article is good for someone doing SEO. Add a little bit of ideas on keyword research, focusing on the topics your potential customers are searching for, and you’d have the basics for writing SEO-friendly copy without getting into the details of keyword density and emphasis.

A press release and a spider-friendly “landing page” aren’t so dissimilar, and it amazes me that to this day there isn’t anyone really offering the combined SEO/PR service (hint, hint, keep an eye on my site, I’m working with a PR firm to put an offering together). Twitter is a great way to reach like minded individuals, but not necessarily a great way to build sustainable traffic.