The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
June 2007, Volume 6, Issue 6

Expand and Leverage the Reach of Social Media by Michael Fujioka, Paid Search Specialist, iProspect

• Create high quality content.
  Your content – anything from blogs to videos and everything in between – should be useful, relevant and interesting to your target audience. The key is to provide value to your audience, whether it is in the form of interesting and helpful information, or some type of entertainment. Granted, creating such content might sound challenging for some advertisers – especially those marketing older, less-hip, more established brands – but it is not insurmountable. For example, the DuPont Corporation recently created a series of videos explaining the science behind some of their most well-known products.



• You’ve got content. Now what?
  Social media blurs the line between publishers and advertisers. Quite simply, in this model, you need to distribute your content. It is not enough to create content and hope that people find it; you need to engage in social media audience development. In fact, a recent JupiterResearch study commissioned by iProspect found that one out of five users do not perform a search on a social media site. This was one of the many findings from the iProspect Social Networking User Behavior Study. The study also determined that most users arrive at social sites through direct navigation/bookmarking, Google search, Yahoo! search, and email links, in that order. Given these user behaviors, creating interesting content is only part of the equation in a successful social media strategy; developing a strong social media community also plays a key role.



• Paid search is an excellent social media distribution channel.
  A carefully planned paid search campaign is a great way to drive qualified traffic to your content. It is even possible to drive paid search traffic to an advertiser’s MySpace profile. Google, in particular, provides all search results on MySpace and YouTube, the two largest social media sites on the Internet. This presence gives advertisers the ability to target users contextually (contextual placements are matched to the type of content the user is engaging with), while users are engaging with social media. For example, imagine a user is on the YouTube “Most Watched” videos of the day tab. Next to that content an advertiser could place a contextual search ad that takes the user to their viral video.



• Leverage existing social media.
  RSS feeds and blog advertising is another excellent channel to develop your social media community. RSS feeds can be thought of as email for the Internet. For example, a user subscribes to an IT blog’s RSS feed, and every time a new post is written, the content appears in the user’s RSS reader, along with all the other content he or she subscribes to. By targeting users who read, or have subscribed to RSS feeds and blogs relevant to your brand, you can be sure that you are reaching people who actively participate in social media, and have expressed interest in your industry or vertical.



• Make sure your content is optimized for social media.
  Once you are driving more qualified traffic to your high quality content, don’t stop there. Make sure people can share your content easily with others. Provide bookmarking buttons from all the major social bookmark sites so users can “vote” for your content; if you have a blog make sure you’re using RSS; submit your videos to YouTube; and post your content to your MySpace page. If your audience likes your content, they will want to share it. Their efforts can greatly increase the distribution of your content, and by extension, your online brand awareness.

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