Which Social media to adopt for your business?

Social media optimization (SMO) is a term many businesses are not familiar with. While one school of thought feels that social media is not understood properly by them, there is also a little-known factoid that for some businesses, social media could reap in rich benefits, particularly if search engine marketing (SEM) and SMO are harnessed effectively.

However, with the high number of social media on the horizon today, which one do you choose from, for your business?

There are a number of social media tools you can choose from, such as networking sites or blogs and microblogs. Each one has its own pros and cons. You can begin with analyzing your own requirements. Typical requirements include:

• Communication with clients
• Relevant customer engagement
• Resolving issues, if any, in a timely and satisfactory manner

Using Facebook

By far, Facebook is one of the most popular platforms for communication. Its applications allow for engagement and interaction – two of the most-needed qualities in any media platform. Facebook is also a good medium for publicity through SMO, since it provides an excellent forum for contextual advertising.

Irrespective of the nature of your services – whether you are a B2B provider, or a B2C provider, the significance of thorough communication can never be overemphasized. With Facebook, you can engage in meaningful customer dialogues, where your customer communicates with you clearly and openly about his or her expectations. It is an effective platform for meaningful engagement and, eventually, effective SEM.

Using Networking Sites

LinkedIn is an example of a networking site, and works very well as a networking and public relations (PR) tool. Because LinkedIn is limited in the sense that it does not allow for conversations and dialogues, it acts ideally as a tool for broadcasting while still inviting opinion.

Your clients may also utilize LinkedIn for referrals. Conversely, if you describe your service offerings on your LinkedIn page there is a likelihood that your clients' contacts will also look up your work, thus becoming your potential clients. Investing some time in research and contextual advertising can help boost your marketing and social media optimization efforts and as well.

Using a Microblog

Twitter is a good example of a microblog. However, as with the microblog structure, the most you can do with Twitter is make a mention, and going ahead, build a story out of the mentions. However, if your customers are not comfortable using the medium, the platform for communication gets limited severely. However, for someone interested in furthering business interests, Twitter can also become part of your SEM strategies.

But an effectively worded text can help draw attention to your problem. This quality has been used by customers to voice their complaints or unhappiness with a particular service or company. Keeping this in mind then, you can choose to use your Twitter account as a forum to talk with your clients and tap into their grievances as well.

Google Penguin Updates: Effects and Solutions

Google, on a periodic basis, updates and enhances their search algorithm to improve the quality of search results. The focus is to have genuinely optimized and relevant quality sites among the top results for the keywords. Google recently announced a new update that would affect website rankings, termed as 'Google Penguin Update'.

The focal point of the Penguin update is the link structure of the website. It examines links which refer to your website on a wide variety of parameters like quality of backlink, anchor text, backlink type, website weightage, etc. So now Site Optimizers have to take due diligence in picking externals links referring to your website. Henceforth, SEO service providers and consultants' efforts of optimizing websites via linking will not be limited to just quantity of links, but also quality of links.

For all those Internet Marketing professionals and Web Marketers who have spent considerable amount of time working with their SEO service providers and consultants building page ranks and achieved the objective of having listed their website among top search results, the questions bugging them most would be about what repercussions the Google Penguin update would have on their site rankings and how to counter them.

If currently the links to your website are from low quality or spammy websites, your site page ranks and search rankings are going to take a major hit from this update. While creating links in the near future, site optimizers will have to double check the quality of the website before submitting your link to the webmasters of the website. Refrain from creating backlinks from websites that look spammy or have bad page ranks.

Most of the SEO service providers and consultants use the same anchor text and same link in order to achieve better ranking. But post- Google Penguin update, the same would be considered as Spam. In order to avoid being tagged as spam, site optimizers will have to use different anchor text as well as different links while getting backlinks.

The sites that would take the major hit would be sites using keyword stuffing or creating keyword clouds as such sites are a prime target for Google Penguin update. The simplest and the best way to avoid it is by using keywords related to your page and maintaining the keyword density ratio in the page content. You can research for keywords related to your page using Google Adword Keyword Tool.

Bottom line, to ensure the consistency of your search ranking your SEO service provider or consultant will have to continuously analyze the rankings on keywords as well as traffic to measure the success of optimization.

If you wish to know more about Search Engine Optimization as well as countering the Google Penguin update effect please feel free to post your queries on bizd@aixsol.com. Please feel free to send your suggestions for any particular topic pertaining to SEO which you wish us to write about and post on this blog.

Lastly please feel free to post your comments and feedback on this blog post. Do continuous analysis of your ranking on keywords as well as traffic to measure the success of optimization. Are you out of reach of such Penguin effects? Do you have any other suggestions? Please do comment to make this article more valuable to optimizers and business persons.