Making “Social Media” part of your “Search Strategy”

This post is written by Humza Ijaz is a Digital Creative Director, currently working @ LBI. His interests include: Designing for Web, Looking out for new technologies and has a new hobby of studying information design.

On a daily basis I am sure you come across clients who want to “leverage of social media” and want to have a social media strategy prepared for themselves. But how do you respond back to there request?

Personally, I always used to get stuck in presenting a social media strategy, mainly because…there isn’t one. Brands need to realize that they are missing a great opportunity in using social media platform as a “listening” tool.

Social media is not another way of marketing yourself and neither do you have a marketing plan for it. However, it is a great tool to use to track what people want from your brand and based on the findings – respond back with campaigns or any other proactive efforts. The only engagement rule in social media is: Do something worth talking about.

The point of today’s discussion is that Social Media purely is an optimization tool for brands, just like Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and is overall part of your Search Engine Marketing (SEM) strategy. Below is an example of how all this fits in together:

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising

Helps you target generic competitive keywords (AdWords) that are currently not being used by other brands

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Promote what your new brand is all about and increase your search visibility by talking about your products and services

Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Manage your digital reputation by tracking what is currently being said about your brand in the social web sphere (social networks, blogs etc). Invest into tools such as www.radian6.com to be able to “listen” about what is being said and actively respond back wherever required
Create a buzz about the new brand by actively engaging via new means with your target

So next time you ever have to pitch to someone just to talk about a “social media” strategy, it will be helpful for you to ask them what are the plans for there overall Search Strategy and make them believe in the idea of Social Media Optimization rather than doing one off Social Media campaigns.

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Tags: advertising, humza ijaz, online advertisng, pay per click, search engine optimization, social media, social media middle east, social media optimization, social media strategy