Social Media and the Open Graph Protocol: Search and Social Hawaii

Christi Olson joins us in this session and is director of marketing at Decide. She is going to talk about social search optimization. What is social search? It has layers and layers:

Blended search:

• Paid search
• Social media
• Images
• News
• Etc.

Real-time search: She is talking about Bing real-time search, and that’s it’s in beta. She worked for Microsoft for years and still doesn’t understand the criteria for showing up in real-time results.

Personalized search: A searchers social graph.

Social search: How branded are you in Facebook and Twitter?

How social is your website? Make it as easy as possible by adding share buttons. The question of where you put them depends on what you’re doing. A home page would put it in a different place than a blog or product page, etc.

People share content online. Open Graph Protocol defines how your page and content will be represented on a social media site. You can use OGP to create the tags in your posts. This gives more visibility.

This last F8 conference changed the Open Graph Protocol dramatically. Look at these changes and learn them. Get this content at:

• https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph
• https://developers.facebook.com/docs/beta

Christi is going over some slides that talk about the recent F8 changes. This includes things like the timeline, recommendations, bars, boxes, activity feeds and more.

Key components to SMO:

• Basic understanding of SEO concepts
• Keywords, keywords, keywords
• Admin access to social media profiles/accounts

SMO process:

• Research and planning
• Recommendations
• Implementation
• Management, reporting, optimization

Social search audits:

• Visibility in search engines – are you ranking in Google and Bing?
• Visibility in social engines
• Technical usability and indexability
• Social content
• Link structure

Facebook best practices for optimization:

• Keyword-rich text: Leverage free-text areas.
• Cross-channel integration: Static links to all owned media channels.
• Optimized profile URL: Vanity URLs.
• Digital assets to optimize photos.
• Brand-relevant URLs.
• Value of HTML: Ensure custom Facebook tabs, etc.
• Keyword density: Craft posts with keywords.
• Drive content sharing: Create content that drives shares – experiment.
• Content relevancy: Fresh, relevant content to build authority.

Twitter best practices for optimization:

• Brand-relevant name.
• Keyword-rich bios with branded and unbranded terms.
• Community following and list inclusion.
• Content frequency: Frequency establishes authority.
• Content visibility: leverage mentions, hashtags, retweets, etc.
• Use keywords that support the brand and business objectives.

Take something you are already doing as a marketer for your clients and make social media optimization the add-on to those services. Apply SEO to the social media aspect; if you’re managing the community, optimize it so those communities get found.

Jessica Lee is the founder and chief creative for bizbuzzcontent Inc., a marketing boutique that focuses on digital content strategy and professional writing services for businesses.

See Jessica's author page for links to connect on social media.