Digital Marketing using Google Services
7 Social Media Optimization or Marketing (SMO/SMM)
Let us name few Social Media we know.
Facebook, Google +, Twitter, LinkedIn
Be active in your Social Media and engage your visitors. As people start interacting, sharing and liking your content, your website will have big fan & follower base. This is a great branding medium you should use to promote your website. As many people start sharing and following your brand content in Social Media, it will be an added advantage for your website ranking through Social media.
You also need to know certain Technical Aspects in Social Media like linking your website to your Social Media Platforms.
First you should need to have your business pages created in all Social Media like Facebook. Let’s get started.
Facebook for Business
I assume that you already have a personal account in Facebook. If you do not have one, please go to www.facebook.com and sign up for a personal profile before you proceed further.
How to create my business page?
Here, I’m going to create a Facebook business page for my business “School for E-Commerce and Digital Marketing”.
Login to your personal profile in Facebook. On the top right corner of your profile, click on the inverted triangle. Click on “Create Page” to create your business page (Snapshot 7.1)
Snapshot 7.1
Choose your business type (Snapshot 7.2).
Snapshot 7.2
Here I chose “Local Business or Place”
Enter your Business Details and Click on Get Started (Snapshot 7.3).
Snapshot 7.3
Add categories, description and website details for your Business ( Snapshot 7.4).
Add your Business Image ( Snapshot 7.5): (In this case, My Photo is my Business ImageJ). Click on Next.
Snapshot 7.5
Click on Add to Favorites to add this Business page to your personal Facebook profile under Favorites section (Snapshot 7.6).
Snapshot 7.6
It provides an option to create an Ad to promote your page in Facebook ( Snapshot 7.7). If you are interested in marketing your page through Facebook Ads, you should start filling up the fields “Location” of your target customers, Interests, age and gender. Set daily budget and click on Promote your page. Click on Skip if you do not want to create an Ad Now.
It takes you to your new Business Page -> Page Tab -> Timeline Tab ( Snapshot 7.8). You can post your business updates, offers, photos, videos, event details, visitor/customer interaction and do more here from this Timeline Tab. As you post, people start interacting, liking, sharing your post and page. As they like your page, your post will be there in their Timeline and it can viewed by their friends. Sometimes your post goes viral. You should treat this as your official Facebook Page.
Snapshot 7.8
After creating your business page, it’s time to be active. First invite your friends ( Snapshot 7.9) by clicking on “Build Audience” drop down -> “Invite Friends” as shown below. You may also send your Business Page URL to your Customers to Like your page to build your Audience. You should claim your official Facebook Business Page URL. I have explained that below.
Snapshot 7.9
Click on About Tab.
Click on Page Info -> Click on “Facebook Web Address” -> Click on “Create a web address for this page?” link (Snapshot 7.10)
Snapshot 7.10
It will take you to Mobile Verification process. Click on Continue -> Provide your mobile number to receive verification code -> Enter verification code -> Save it. Now your account is mobile verified and it will allow you to claim your Facebook Business Page URL.
Click on the drop down as shown and choose your business page.
Click on “Continue as ……” to claim your page URL ( Snapshot 7.11).
Start typing your business name or any name that suits your business. You are going to get your Official Facebook Business Page URL. Choose it with care (Snapshot 7.12). I wanted it to be like “www.facebook.com/digitalmarketing” but I could not get that as someone else have already taken it. Check your business URL availability. Keep trying.
Snapshot 7.12
Finally I found one “digitalmarketingexecutiveeducation” for my business (Snapshot 7.13). Click on confirm.
Snapshot 7.13
Yes, We are in last step of acquiring Facebook Business Page URL.
Click on OK.
My Facebook Business Page URL from now will be:
I can just type this in my browser to reach my Business Page. You can mention this in your website too. Start sending this URL to your Friends, Relatives, and Customers to like your Business Page. Acquiring Business Page URL helps in creating Branding in Social Platform.
Next step should be to add more business details to your Facebook Business Page. Click on About Tab -> Page Info (Snapshot 7.14)
Enter your Hours of Operation Short and Long Description Mission, Awards and Products details
Provide as much info as possible to help your customers.
Key Tabs
We have few key tabs on the top of the page such as Page, Messages, Notifications, Insights and Settings.
Page Tab
Page Tab has Timeline, About, Photos, Likes and more other Tabs. The key tab to focus on is Timeline. You should create engaging posts to keep your visitors engaged. Your post should need to have greater reach. Start creating creative posts (with images) and target trending topics with #tagging technique to have better reach. Here is an example (Snapshot 7.15):
Snapshot 7.15
We posted this and targeted the trending #AppleOnARoll. Also we mentioned this term “Apple” in the post. Look at the reach. Trending topics will be available from your Facebook Personal profile home page. Open a New Browser window and open your Facebook.com. Look at the Trending Topics (Snapshot 7.16).
Snapshot 7.16
You also have to open the image and tag your friends to get better reach. To do so, from your personal profile, search for your business page and open it (Snapshot 7.17).
Snapshot 7.17
Click on the image you want to tag your friends.
Click on Tag Photo and select the image (Snapshot 7.18). Type your friends or customers name and tag it. It will send a Notification to them.
Snapshot 7.18
You can also target your text posts addressing/mentioning specific people by typing @[name]. Replace name with the actual person name.
Posts
We can schedule our posts for a future date and time. The data about the scheduled posts and draft posts are also present in the activity tab.
Insights Tab
Insights provide you the exact data about page’s performance.
Insights can be categorized and analysed based on likes, reach, visits, posts and people.
Likes:Likes are given by our fans for the post or for our page.
Reach: Reach shows how many people have viewed our posts regardless of whether they have liked our post or not. Reach increases if our fans like and share our posts. When people like our posts, their friends would be receiving this information in their news feed and hence they might click and view our post. Thus our posts reach increases.
Visits:Visits are the number of page visits.
Posts:Post contains post details such as posts that are already posted, its engagement and reach details.
People:People include the demographics data such as age and gender.
Settings Tab(Snapshot 7.19)
Settings Tab has General Page related settings. A key setting to note down is Page Roles.
Snapshot 7.19
You can add other users say your employee to manage your Business Page from here. Google does show Facebook Business Page URLs in its Search Results for business related keywords. It is time for you to be very active with your Facebook Business Page Posts Engagement activities and that should bring in your Facebook Business Page URL in Google search results for your relevant business queries.
Twitter for Business
Sign up for Twitter here www.twitter.com. When you sign up provide your business name as user name so that it creates www.twitter.com/businessname as your twitter URL. Provide your business description, website details and if required link it with other social media.
Let me open our LocSea’s twitter page www.twitter.com/locsea. Note down various components in this page like Tweets, Following, Followers, “Edit Profile” button, “Trends” section, “Who to follow” section, “Profile” section, etc.
Create Followers for your business page by asking your customers and visitors to follow it.
Your posts (also called astweets) should not exceed 140 Characters. Try to post as many tweets related to your business as possible to engage your followers.
Retweet(Reply) interesting tweets to get attention.
Follow great people. As you follow, they get a notification about you.
Create tweet targeting trending #tags.
Create good header and profile photos. Make sure to link your website, provide detailed description about your company in your Twitter profile. It adds value to your SEO effort. To update your company details, click on Edit Profile and it opens up this page:
Update your photos and profile details from this screen. Keep posting targeting trending topics and engage. It slowly builds quality followers and visitors to your page.
Tips
We have few time saving social media automation tools to list. Try these. Just type these names in Google and go through their websites.
· Hootsuite
· Pagemodo
· Social bro
· Sprout social
· Spred fast
· Social oomph
· Dlvr.it
· IFTTT
· Zapier
· Aweber
· Postplanner
· Buffer
Pinterest for Business
Pinterest.com has built quite a larger reputation for itself throughout the major countries like U.S. and the U.K. and is gaining popularity in other countries as well and most notably in India. Pinterest is the 3rdmost popular Social Media followed by Facebook and Twitter. The basic concept of Pinterest is information delivered through pictures (i.e.) people are often attracted by pictures rather than words that is the idea of Pinterest.
The feature that makes Pinterest stands apart from other social Media is its ability to target the specific audience of the particular business that is, it is easy to target the audience you require to view your business related stuff in Pinterest. And moreover, Pinterest is one of THE best social media platforms for an Ecommerce website.
So let us move into how Pinterest will drive in traffic to your site.
The Sign-up, Boards and Pins:
First thing you got to do is just sign up your business with Pinterest (www.pinterest.com) and start creating post related to your business.
After signing up, the next step is to create a pin board. Pin Boards are similar to the normal office boards where we pin important stuffs.
The next step is a little tricky, creating the most creative, eye-catching pins for your target audience.
The Pin boards are actually classified into
1) Product Board
2) Content Board
Product Board:
The name itself tells you the info, this board is used to display the array of products you have, if you are an ecommerce website.
Furthermore these product boards can be further divided into
· Boards that will display pins about your products
· Latest trend in the market and whether your product matches that trend · Products that are selling like a hot cake and products with discounts.
Content Board:
Content boards are content specific boards where your pins contain sound content about your products. All you got to do is just drop a link on your pin that will redirect your audience to your blog site where the relevant content for the particular product is present.
The best part about Pinterest is that it allows users to search about specific products or content they view, for example if your user want to search for food recipes, Pinterest easily categorizes the search into boards or pins exactly related to food.
This is a primitive way of Pinterest to drive traffic to your site. Let’s move on to the promoted ads aspect of Pinterest.
Instagram for Business
Let’s bring on the Next Hot and top trending social media The Instagram ( instagram.com). Sounds cool isn’t it, yea the name says it all, your instant photos is called as Instagram. Instagram recently surpassed twitter, having over a 300 million accounts and having whooping no of people engaging every second. Instagram could be a source of serious traffic for your site.
The strategies followed by leading brands:
Some of the Leading brands in Instagram follow various strategies to cover their audience base; we will discuss some of the strategies now
A Backstage Pass:
The Blackberry brand uses Instagram as a source of providing a backstage insight into their company and devices, their strategy is to show people the insights that they can’t view in person in the company.
The Levi’s brand uses Instagram to show their legacy in the wardrobe line to their audience, right from their origin to their development and their experiment with the jeans can be seen in their Instagram ads.
Source of Motivation:
Leading Brand like Adidas use Instagram as source of motivating their audience for a brisk beginning of their fitness life by providing eye gasping high resolution pictures of various sports persons and extreme fitness people. Their strategy has working out well for them because many of their audience have been “ADIDAINSPIRED”
The Macy’s brand is using Instagram to showcase their artwork of various fashion outfits to attract its fashion savvy audience. They use ads showcasing various high fashion outfits in the market. This way they increase their traffic through Instagram.
The next strategy seems even more sassy and simple
Customer sharing:
The famous Ben & Jerry’s follow this simple and highly effective strategy of allowing their customers to share their yummy and tasty moment they had with a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and flavours. This simple technique has been an phenomenal success for the franchise as more and more of its customers have been sharing their awesome and yummy ice cream on the social media.
Google Plus for Business:
Google Plus is another social media site, where we can create business pages for our business like every other social media site. We have already covered about Google Plus in a different name. Remember Google MyBusiness Chapter? YesJYour Google MyBusiness page is also referred as Google+ Business page. Please refer Chapter 4.
LinkedIn for Business
LinkedIn ( https://www.linkedin.com/ ) is a professional network. I assume you already have personal profile in LinkedIn. If not, please signup for a personal profile here: https://www.linkedin.com/ . Please make sure to add your complete professional details in LinkedIn as this is a professional network. You should be very active in adding projects, client details, getting recommendations, adding your certificates, etc.,
Google provides priority to Linked Profiles and also Company Pages. To create your Company Page for your Business, please follow these steps.
LinkedIn Company Page
Login to your personal profile in LinkedIn and click on Interests -> Companies (Snapshot 7.20). It is free to create your Company Page in LinkedIn.
Snapshot 7.20
Click on Create and it opens up the Company Page creation window (Snapshot 7.21) 
Provide your Company Name, Description, Website and Industry details (Snapshot 7.22).
Snapshot 7.22
You can also designate people to manage your Company Page (Snapshot 7.23).
Snapshot 7.23
Choose your company image ( Snapshot 7.24)
Provide Specialities and add your featured groups if you have already joined or own ( Snapshot 7.25).
Snapshot 7.25
That’s all about creating a company page. You should post professional updates happening in your company on your Company Page. Also try join or create new Groups (communities) and contribute to your industry. You can create or join new Groups from Interest -> Groups menu (Snapshot 7.26).
Click on what you want to do and start contributing (Snapshot 7.27).
Snapshot 7.27
You can also useInterests->Pulseto post your professional articles in LinkedIn.
Summary :
Make use of Social Media Platforms to build your branding by posting interesting updates, offers, contests and customer support. As people start sharing, following and liking your page and posts, you will have greater brand reach. This brand reach helps your website rank higher. If you have a popular social media company page, the chances are very high for your page to appear in Google Search for related keywords for your business. It helps you gain relevant traffic to your website.
Be very active and creative!