Remarkable Social Media Marketing and Optimization, Part I

A well-executed social media campaign can result in favorable branding, instant PR, and higher organic search engine results. Some companies are using social media to replace large numbers of customer service reps, while others have used it to make some of the highest-ROI ad campaigns in history—based on content and conversation versus broadcasting cute sales pitches.

The basic concept behind social media optimization is simple: implement changes to make a site/brand and its content more connected to online communities. By spreading around your great content and knowledge through articles, photos, videos, and free downloads, you show off your industry expertise. You then get linked to, which helps your SEO efforts, and you receive visits from people interested in what you have to say or share. Your social profiles then show up in searches on search engines and are more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs.

Social media marketing, especially as it ties in so perfectly with SEO, is one of the lowest-cost ways to create targeted traffic, exceptional relationships, more credibility, engagement, and links. That makes it hard to justify not getting involved in social media and putting some of your marketing budget into this new area. Given a lower cost per lead, big dollars are tumbling down from traditional ad spends and are headed this way.

By now, you’re nodding your head. You understand that “pull” marketing to start conversations that could lead to conversions is so much smarter than trying to sell/push stuff on anyone ever again.

You understand that you have to give to get and you are reading this saying to yourself, “Yes, that’s what I have to do.”

Then you take a moment and say to yourself…

“How do I do that?” or “I am terrified by what this means to my company.”

And you should be scared and maybe even terrified, because your competitors are dreaming up things you just won’t believe. Take the case of Vail Resorts. They are so dedicated to digital marketing that they shifted 80 percent of their marketing budget to digital production and social media strategy. They got their entire team together and decided that if new media is the way of the future, then they need to make a radical change. They discovered that their audience is more than just about skiing and leaving. They love to be social. So they made a site that lets users share photos, videos, and stories. They hired photographers and videographers to film people and have it uploaded to their personal portal set up for each visitor on the resort site. They put digital “receivers” in the ski tickets that marked what visitors did during the day and their journey was uploaded online to the portal. In other words, they changed their products and services radically to keep up with the new possibilities created by the wild, wild Internet.

Are you ready for that kind of remarkable change?

photo credit: ansik via photopin cc

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