Want to know how to use video to harness the power of social media?

On Wednesday the 22nd September at Forte Mandurah Quays Resort I’ll be hosting a seminar for the Professional Women’s Network on “How to use YouTube to enhance SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and drive more traffic to your website.

The PWN has opened its doors up to the men again so invite your partners, bosses, husbands and friends to this “too good to miss” event.

Here’s what you can look forward to:
1. Introduction – Samples of successful YouTube campaigns and channels
2. Choosing your topics – what do your customers want to see?
3. Shooting your video – How to make a great 2 min video
4. Creating you own YouTube Channel – Where you will host your epic productions
4. Optimising for SEO – (This is where the power is!)
5. Building a base of viewers – Creative ways to “seed” your video
6. Embedding videos into your website and social media – Sharing the video and creating links.

$15 for Chamber Members, $20 for Non Members
Includes canapés – drinks can be ordered from the bar.

Bookings are essential.

Please book by emailing paulinebright@actioncoach.com
OR phone Pauline Bright on 0413 739196

Bouvard Cruises in Mandurah started their journey down the Social Media marketing road late last year by firstly creating a Facebook business page closely followed by a blog called “Mandurah’s Dolphin Blog”, a YouTube Channel and a Twitter account. The strategy was to use the blog to record sightings using photos and videos then use their Facebook and Twitter pages to share the information and drive traffic to their website.

The Rewards

10 months later and they are now seeing the rewards. Over the 10 month period the Dolphin Blog has become the highest referring website for sending visitors to the Bouvard Cruises website, followed by Experience Perth then their Facebook page. They have seen a 72% increase in visitors to their site since last year and it’s still climbing!

But it gets better!

Using Google Analytics to monitor traffic to their website we’ve seen in the last 3 months their Facebook page has overtaken the Dolphin Blog as their highest referring website, it actually referred 3 times as much traffic as their second referring website. In fact their Facebook page sent more visitors to their website in the last month than the combined total of their next 8 referring sites! As far as traffic sources go only Google is higher than their Facebook page!

So what does this tell us?

A social media strategy used effectively drives traffic to your website.
A Facebook page is a powerful marketing tool. Combine it with a blog for more power.
If you don’t have a Facebook page or a blog or a social media strategy… you are missing out.
If you have a Facebook page and a blog keep using it.
Make more postings, monitor them daily and interact with your customers who make posts and replies.
Make it part of your daily office marketing routine to check your Facebook page first thing every morning and again last thing in the afternoon. Make at least 1-2 post a week and make sure respond to yours fans posts and questions.
Most importantly stick at it!

This all this proves that a social media campaign involving a clear strategy is a very powerful marketing tool that drives customers to your website. Just ask Rod!

I was just discussing with a friend the benefits of blogging and how it makes your website dynamic and more enticing to customers and search engines. Our talk reminded me of this post by Hubspot that I came across recently.

Many companies have useful content on their websites, but having good content is no longer enough.

The problem with many companies is not that they are incapable of entering the content mindset. It’s that they stop having this mindset once they launch their site.

Websites are static, but blogs are dynamic. All these companies need to do is turn their static content into dynamic content.

3 Reasons Why Your Website Content Should be Dynamic

1. It Keeps Your Visitors Interested

You want people to have a reason to come back to your website. If your website content is static, visitors can just browse your site once and they’re done. But if you’re putting out new content all the time, they have reason to come back. And if your content is truly interesting, they’ll even subscribe to your updates via RSS or e-mail and refer it to others.

2. More Pages = More SEO Juice

Each blog post is a new page that search engines see, and therefore a new opportunity to get found online. Packing as much content as possible into a just few pages is not an effective search engine optimization strategy.

3. Incentive to Create More Content

After companies pack their websites with useful content, they often avoid adding new content to their sites. If you don’t have a blog, adding more content means redesigning the site and complicating the layout.

Shouldn’t you put yourself in a position that encourages you to provide more useful information to your site visitors?

Presenting the dynamic parts of your site in a blog will help you gain followers, improve your SEO, and encourage you to produce more useful content for your site visitors.

Your website should contain some information about your company, outside of your blog. However, this should be reserved for basic information that does not change often. The information that does change, such as news, offerings and events should be in a blog.

Many companies are already doing the right thing by offering useful content. They just need to make the change from presenting information in a static way to doing so dynamically through a blog.

This blog post is courtisy of Hubspot

There have been 4 major events this past year that have changed the importance and the effectiveness of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
1) Yahoo & Google announced that they no longer use key words and meta tags in their searches that effect search engine rankings.
2) Facebook passed Google as the most visited website on the Internet.
3) The phrase “Facebook” became the most searched word typed into search engines.
4) Google created their own social networking site, Buzz.

SEO is still important but not as important now as SMO (Social Media Optimisation). With Facebook recently overtaking Google as the most visited website on the internet shows that people using the Internet are the ones that are dictating where it’s future is heading and what it’s going to be used for. Searching for information will still be a part of life on the Internet, but entertainment, socialising and sharing experiences is what most users are now looking for and doing online. And the scramble is now on to take advantage of this shift.

Brands and companies need to have a social media presence. This shows that it’s now more important for brands and companies to have their message on social media, it’s now not good enough what companies and businesses write about themselves on their own website, it’s what others are saying about them and how their message is being spread through social media.

This ‘shifting of the cheese’ shows that users of the Internet are the ones that are unconsciously but effectively controlling and designing the way the the internet will be used in the future and how we will interact with it.

Businesses must now combine both SEO and SMO if they wish to be found and have an effective online presence or they run the risk of not getting their message heard.

B.L. Ochman is a Managing Director of Proof Digital Media; publisher of What’s Next Blog, and co-founder of pet site Pawfun.com. Follower her on Twitter at @whatsnext.

Companies large and small are rushing to understand and get involved in social media. But most of the agencies and consultants who are being paid to establish social media campaigns for corporations are afraid to tell their clients three things they don’t want to hear.

1. Everyone Must Work Together

In most big companies, IT, digital, marketing and sales not only don’t work together, they compete with each other. Until they start collaborating as a team, you will not succeed in social media.

For example, I recently handled social media advertising for a major retail chain’s holiday microsite. The promotion was conceived by the digital department and involved augmented reality. But the IT department refused to allow a link from the homepage to the microsite because the microsite’s design was done by an external agency.

Further, the marketing department refused to allow a dedicated e-mail to go out to the company’s mailing list, and when placed in the company’s normal promotional e-mail, the link to the microsite was lost in a sea of weekly specials.

These hurdles made it very hard to drive traffic to the microsite.

But more than that, this lack of internal collaboration and contact makes any kind of social media involvement virtually impossible.

A company that hasn’t learned to listen to its own employees, and encourage them to collaborate internally, is not likely to succeed in integrating social media tools into its marketing mix, no matter what agency or consultant they hire.

2. Top Management Must Be On Board

If the direction doesn’t come from the very top, managers, who have myriad reasons to fear change, will hang on to the status quo.

Despite the best intentions of agencies and consultants, social media integration is bound to meet huge resistance until top management says it’s OK to spend time and money to integrate it into the company’s marketing and culture.

Example: The marketing team of an international manufacturer of electronics wanted to know how the company could begin to use social media and we discussed the many possibilities.

Listening and responding to what customers are saying about the brand in social media can supply good intelligence and give the company a chance to interact with customers.

“Our management doesn’t want to listen to customers,” the PR director said. “They want to talk to them.”

However, that doesn’t work anymore. The status quo is dead. Any company that isn’t willing to listen to customers and be nimble and quick enough to respond, and, when necessary, change, will soon be unable to compete with smart, tech-savvy companies that can turn on a dime.

Willingness to change is the new bottom line for every business today. But top management has to buy in before change can begin.

3. Don’t Expect Overnight Success

Sure there are videos that go viral, contests that attract a lot of buzz, and Facebook pages that get a lot of fans. But what comes after those efforts?

After the tools change (and they surely will) how will social media fit into the company’s overall strategy and help it reach long-term goals?

Example: Smart companies look at the long-term. The Fiskateers, now in its sixth year, is the brainchild of digital agency Brains on Fire, for their client Fiskars.

With the scissors brand losing market share to foreign knock-offs, the company enlisted several actual crafters to blog, attend events, and represent the brand to customers as part of a new community strategy.

“If you empower your customers to become your evangelists, you’d better be prepared to continue it,” says Brains on Fire’s Geno Church. “It’s permanent when you engage in this type of marketing.”

Once you have created the community, listen to it. Fiskars made several changes to its products based on what it discovered through its Fiskateers community. Doing so helped build customer trust and loyalty.

Where Should Your Company Start?

Realizing that employing social media in the marketing mix is a long-term commitment to change, the best way to start is to pick manageable, measurable goals.

Pick a small number of social media goals for the coming year. Some possibilities:

- Turn the company newsletter into an internal blog and give all employees the ability to contribute
- Establish a social media policy for employee participation in social media on company time and beyond
- Let employees vote on the best ideas suggested by other employees
- Resolve to respond to customer service issues within three hours, via social media

Don’t try to do all of these things at once. Pick the ones that are most likely to be possible for your company to start and sustain.