Integrating Search and Social: Top Social Tactics For Search Marketers #smx #21A

This session is a social + search “speed round.” We’ve got three speakers queued up and ready to share their favorite authority-building social tips. According to the SMX conference agenda this hour will be primarily focused on integrating search and social media efforts. Topics slated for discussion include OpenGraph technology, Google+, Twitter and more.

Monica Wright @monicawright, Director of Audience Engagement, Search Engine Land and Marketing Land, is moderating and our three speakers are:

Annalise Kaylor, Associate Creative Director, aimClear (@annabelleblue)
Debra Mastaler, Link Building Specialist, Alliance-Link (@debramastaler)
Mark Traphagen, Director of Digital Outreach, Virante, Inc. (@marktraphagen)

Influencer Marketing & Finding Influencers

Debra Mastaler starts us off and will talk about influencer marketing. This is the process of finding, tapping into and using people with high credibility and high visibility in your niche. She looks at everything from a link builder’s perspective. The emphasis in search is credibility, quality and trust. Trust is one of the hardest to tie to a tactic, and that’s what influencer marketing does. She’s going to show us her process and tools.

3 types of influencers:

1. People

2. Brands

3. Personalities, ex: Oprah

We won’t pay attention to personalities as much in this presentation, but she’ll look at people and brands. People are often not open to pimping your brand. You may not be able to tap them for help, but we may be able to use them by following their footprints. Types of people with most leads and opportunities are bloggers, journalists and experts.

Find the blogs, find the bloggers. Search your keyword in Facebook and you’ll see all the pages around that topic. If someone has taken the time to build a Facebook page on that, they’ll have a solid blog about it. Facebook also dumps on Bing and so it’s possible these results are showing up in Bing. Technorati also has a repository with ratings of blogs, making it a great place to find bloggers. Alltop has a spider that crawls Twitter, so if a blog is mentioned quite a bit on Twitter, that builds them into their curation process and you’ll find blogs with influence and reach. Google Blog Directory is also a good curated source of blogs that can be sorted by influence and ranking.

Find the blogs, check the bloggers. You want the blogs to be frequent in posting and plugged into Google+. Look for quality domains and strong backlink profiles; check that there are good and plenty backlinks pointing at the blogs. Check the tweet reach and frequency.

Measure social influence. Klout can be a good tool to check for influencers since already the pool is filtered by people who have signed up for the service and thus they are interested in being influential. Followerwonk can be used to find reach and visibility of Twitter users. Traackr assigns people an influence score.

Here’s a gem: Google+ Communities. It’s a goldmine of information. It’s forums, topical and location. These people are very active on Google+. You can also use Google Posts to find posts with most pluses and shares, and these people you know share their info on Google+. GPlusData will give you stats on individuals, like how many people have a user in circles, and she uses this along with CircleCount, which then shows you how many times an individual or website has been mentioned on Google+.

Comments are icebreakers. Use CircleCount to see all the comments a Google+ user has made and you may end up finding a way to enter conversation with them.

Find and use experts for more advanced writing. An expert:

• Has academic credentials
• Actively practicing
• Blogging and writing is secondary
• Professional affiliations
• Usually compensated

She finds experts on expert witness directories, Google Scholar/Books and Score, the retired executives association.

Using Google+ to Capture SERP Real Estate

Mark Traphagen takes the podium next with his presentation “Putting the SEO Power of Google+ to Work” and the key here is using Google+ to capture more SERP real estate and get you in front of more eyeballs. When he started being active on Google+ he was building connections and communities. He found early on that his Google+ posts would perform well in Google search results. He reshared a post, which embeds the full original post in his. A few days later his post was the post that ranked for that content. He could consistently rank above the first poster, and it wasn’t engagement on the post or number of followers. So what was it?

He also decided it wasn’t AuthorRank and having authorship set up. Even just last week John Muir said that they aren’t using authorship for ranking. The strikes against AuthorRank:

1. Low authorship adoption.

2. Social signal parsing is in infancy.

3. Mis-attribution is still occurring.

One thing we do know is that Google+ Communities, Profiles and Pages have PageRank. This is different than any other social network out there. Google is treating them as every other part of the web ecosystem. What does this mean? Google+ mentions in the system count as links with value, and external links count too.

A case study: Google+ Fitness & Nutrition Community. In a week they got 4 links from high PR blogs. In a few days their community went from page 8 to page 1 for the competitive phrase “fitness and nutrition” and stayed there for 3 months.

Fore more on advantages of a strong Google+ network, read his post bit.ly/gplusnetwork. Google+ will contribute to trust signals that may cause a brand to show up a knowledge panel for branded search results.

How to Track and Measure Social Marketing ROI

Annalise Kaylor is next and will talk about how you can report social ROI. The tactic might vary – SEO, social… On social networks, your competing with a consumers grandma and boyfriend. Your job as marketer is not to beat your market competitor, it’s creating content that stands up to family and friends’ posts.

None of the data has meaning until it’s tied to a specific goal within your social media strategy. How does talking to your customers tie to your offline goals, for example. You may need to use more than one source to find the answers you need. It’s time for the C-suite and SEO pros to say that one paltform may not cut it. Social media ROI is a changing concept, goals change and definitions change with it.

Social is a tactic in a big picture strategy.

Tactic: Facebook Insights has a bunch of data about negative feedback, and that ties to a date. This is essentially an “unlike” – hiding all your content, for example. Look for negative feedback tied to a date and the content created then, and you’ll know what kind of content resonates with your community.

Consumption Type is another type of Insight you’ll see. Are people clicking through on a photo? You know then they wanted to see it better. You can look at this data any time, including immediately – you don’t have to wait for a deep dive or statistical amount of collected data.

Try location based content posting to create a social testing ground. This is essentially A/B testing on social. Then you’ll see which version is preferred. If you’re not testing it, you can’t improve it.

That brings us to “dark social.” You can’t game email, IM or text. It’s pure, raw social. It’s sharing behind the scenes where marketers have no influence. The Atlantic was seeing data of traffic from long URLs, where they know it wasn’t typed in. When links are emailed or sent through Facebook messages, they come across without that referrer info. Tagging the content with UTMs so you can see where it’s coming from lets you regain data and know where traffic is coming from. This is vital to determining true ROI – you can’t track you can’t measure, you can’t measure you can’t report.

Remember that demographics matter. Gen X shares more via email. Millennial share via social platforms. Boomers love Facebook, email and WOM.

Virginia Nussey is the director of content marketing at MobileMonkey. Prior to joining this startup in 2018, Virginia was the operations and content manager at Bruce Clay Inc., having joined the company in 2008 as a writer and blogger.

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