SMX Liveblog: 25 Social Media Ideas for the Advanced Search Marketer

Get the skinny on social media tools, tactics and more in this session geared towards savvy search marketers, featuring:

• Michael King, Executive Director of Owned Media, Acronym (@ipullrank)
• Matt Siltala, President, Avalaunch Media (@Matt_Siltala)
• Mark Traphagen, Senior Director of Online Marketing, Stone Temple Consulting (@marktraphagen)
• Lisa Williams, Director, Digital Marketing Strategy, Search Discovery (@seopollyanna)

Lisa Williams on Adding Social Media to Overall Strategy

Williams tells us to start with the actual product and make a connection to the product with great storytelling. Look at search technology as a way to tell a story about your product. Communication strategy should be your first step to making that connection and storytelling. Come up with a communication strategy that’s specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and timebound.

When collaborating between the search and social teams, unify silos with a methodology. Embrace a process that drives business objectives and encourage role clarity and ownership amongst the team. It’s important to have a goal to approach together as a team. Some actionable tasks for your team:

• Create timelines that are specific to the audience. For example, stay high level for execs.  Search and social marketers need to have a timeline laid out to work together that is defined for the audience.
• Define your assets, and know what you’re optimizing. You don’t know what users will choose to interact with, so you want to optimize all types of content including landing pages, images, videos, etc.
• Define channel priorities: Prioritize your paid, owned and earned opportunities.  Make a grid of the three categories with all your platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest) and list out the opportunities for those platforms. Again, this should be shared with both the search and social teams.
• Create collaborative calendars: get strategic for social and search to thrive together.  Make an editorial calendar that lists out dates, topics, content assets, keywords, target audience, calls-to-action, channels and additional notes in a spreadsheet.

Williams said it’s also important to visualize with content pillars. Think about a story or piece of content and look at other channels that you want to use to promote it. Think about how the platforms are connected and the opportunities on each platform. Furthermore:

• Define influencer outreach: build relationships and authority.
• Nurture relationships: you can’t automate relationships (automation isn’t strategy). Work hard to collaborate together once you’ve defined influencers you’d like to collaborate with.
• Engage media and movements: define amplification opportunities. Who do you want to partner with for specific campaigns? Define these opportunities
• Define partnerships: research partners for curation and collaboration. Curation doesn’t mean repurposing! Take a group of content, put it together in a meaningful, but NEW way.
• Alignment on KPIs: what does success look like? Define the KPIs so you can measure your success.

Michael King: Finding Content That Works for Your Marketing

King advises us to integrate SEO and social – 95 percent of marketers that consider themselves superior strategists have integrated search and social according to a 2013 study. Moreover, King notes that every good SEO/social campaign starts with research! Research informs you so you can make great content. Social media acts as your focus group; when building personas, use data from social media.

King stresses the importance of defining business goals, conducting keyword research, listening to social activity and taking social inventory. He recommends some tools:

• Keyword research tools
  • Keyword planner
  • Uber suggest
  • Use Google for suggest terms
• Social Listening Tools
  • Organic: Topsy
  • Organic: Social Mention
  • Organic: Icerocket
  • Paid: radian6
  • Paid: Sprinkler

King recommends identifying influencers via:

• Followerwonk
• Twtrland
• Quora

When it comes to content, he recommends using Quora or Reddit to determind what users want.

Bottom line? Do award-winning work. Be king of kings.

Matt Siltala: How to Bring to Life Visual Content to Compel Social Strategies

Siltala is going to talk about bringing two worlds together – offline and online — through social media and visual content.

Types of visual content:

• Infographics
• Pitch decks/slides
• Ebooks/white papers
• Interactive graphics
• Motion graphics

Then take things a step further with the visual content marketing and create stuff that businesses can use both online and offline! Use infographics as brochures for example.

Your job as a company is to help companies to not fall behind the curve. Creative content helps. Find opportunities where sales/knowledge needs to increase and then create content for on and offline. Ask sales team questions, listen to social buzz, define problem and then strategize.

Instagram is HOT. One of the most powerful tools you can use right now.

Great platform to integrate a social strategy. Waffle Crush is an example of a company doing it RIGHT. They only post locations, specials, etc. on their Instagram account.

Use it to show off your products in context.  Online & Offline worlds come together here.

Infographics can make great offline handouts so use this to your advantage.

How to cross over from social to the store – Nordstrom’s does a good job of this.

Encourage cross social sharing.

Social media can bring you back to the top.

Mark Traphagen: Author Authority for Advanced Search Marketers

So what makes author authority? An authoritative author is both the originator and promoter. In social, you have got to be the original creator of the content. If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation. If you’re a creator, you want to be the one who’s changing the conversation.

Rel=author and beyond

• Rel=author, in Dec. 2013, Google began to reduce the amount of authorship showing in SERPs.
• Site authority and history was the No. 1 factor in author rank.
• If you’re writing more on high authority sites, you’re more likely to get picked up.
• Someone who produces good content with depth is more likely to show up.
• Google has confirmed that author trust is a factor — they look at the overall trust that people seem to have in an author.

What does rel=author do for you?

• Reinforces your brand
• This becomes powerful as more and more searching show your results
• Shows you in personalized search (+1s)
• Google wants to know who you are.

How to Build Author Authority

This is going to become more important in the future. It’s important now for your brand to connect through social to your audience.

• Be the “anyone” that people want to listen to
• Be productive
• Not necessarily publishing every day, but often enough
• Be authoritative
• Know your stuff … and know your stuff better than anyone else
• You’re good, get better
• Be thorough
• Be different/don’t be afraid to stand out
• Say things no one else is saying
• Find your own voice
• Find a way of presenting content that is unique
• Be ubiquitous
• Build social following
• Share your best content, even if it’s from the past
•  If you want some respect, go out and get it for yourself

Once a hard working corporate type, Jayme traded in her office and business attire for cowboy boots and the Sierra Nevada mountains. At one time Jayme was the director of SEO for Bruce Clay Inc., then senior SEO analyst for WebMetro. She now spends her time out in the country. As a busy mom, soccer coach, weekly volleyball player, weekend hiker and hobbyist photographer she does manage to find a few hours a week to stay connected to the Internet Marketing world plus she is still doing SEO on a handful of clients. You won't find her active on Twitter or her own blog, because when she does have spare time she's usually away from her computer enjoying what life has to offer, away from the computer monitor. In fact her own website is sinfully neglected. Even though she has grand plans to one day put some energy into her own blog that day still hasn't arrived, possibly after her kids are both in school.

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