Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) notes from Africa: Part 3

This is the final part of a three part series discussing SEO’s integration with social media to form a holistic digital strategy.  The evolution of the internet and the manner in which users engage with one another, and the brands they associate themselves with, gives us the classic case of shifting goal posts. While it is important to be familiar with current thinking on social media, such as optimal times for posting on the various platforms, one must not lose sight of the fact that each campaign must rely on the creativity of its team and uniqueness of approach in digital media be truly successful.

Practically, engagement should be memorable; the experience is ultimately what the user will walk away with as an impression of the brand.  So, while there is a definite strategy and vision one should have in place, there is no template or “right” way of doing things – it is largely subjective and spawning an era of digital strategists.  A long-term vision should be aligned with your activation techniques and form a collective digital strategy. Increasingly, we are seeing digital morph into the traditional marketing and advertising space. Marketing must include an element of digital to be competitive. It is all becoming one very dynamic environment. Engagement is continuing to be driven by how the internet grows and behaves, as a result, activations are part of the shifting goal posts dilemma alluded to above and digital branding is going to require an agency (or individual) with a wide range of skills. This is why the hobby that was measuring facebook has now shifted into a global business model of social media analytical tools, facebook engagement tactics and so on. 

With that in mind, ensuring one gets a return on investment (ROI) on a social media campaign will almost always rely on decisions based off social media analytics, facebook analytics and the like.  Getting it right at the outset and trusting your data is imperative.   Lets consider some activation techniques that get the most success on the social media platform:

• Free Stuff 

Everyone loves a freebie, particularly with times seemingly tough worldwide. Take for example a lottery ticket and the screen shot from Facebook below.

This is my personal page.  Typically, my engagement is between about 2-10 per post.  I posted the lottery picture on a Saturday at around 4pm South African time. It received about 40 likes and 18 comments within a few hours. At least a 500% increase on what is normally the case.  To test the same theory, I did this again with a new lottery ticket but this time on a weekday. I posted the ticket at around 12pm on a Tuesday with the draw the following day.  The results were almost identical with at last a 500% increase on the norm; the Facebook screen shot of the second lottery ticket is below.

Now obviously these results are not scientific and in no way can one draw definitive conclusions from them, but the trend looks good. Also, a Facebook business page will react in a different manner, but again, the trend is what is important when engineering an effective internet marketing strategy or strategies.  With a brand, using a similar principal, on the launch of product, range, new line etc. something as simple as a branded trucker hat will probably get you a significant increase on your normal engagement levels, particularly if your Facebook business page or similar social media platform has a large fan base.   

• Competitions

Similar to the above but this is categorized by larger scale campaigns where the cost and audience are proportionately higher. The potential return on investment is also significantly higher, but so is the risk….See for example the T-Mobile Motorola Cliq campaign.

• Emotional heartstrings

No one can resist a good cause, particularly when it’s a cause they would otherwise have no ability to “contribute” towards. For example, a brand could leverage an issue that is a current hot topic, such as in South Africa at the moment there is a particular push to eradicate rhino poaching.  A brand can align their charitable donations to a social media campaign to support a cause and get the issue “out there”.  A simple one could be to associate a certain number of likes or retweets to an amount of money thereby giving incentive to promote a good cause (and push the brand).

• Humour 

Consider the screen shot below.

One could use a popular (at the time) image with a humorous or ironic take on popular culture.  The above “milk tash” is just one of many examples with the increasing popularity of men’s health month – Movember

Above all, be creative in the long and short term while taking advantage of the immediacy of social media and the increasing trend of media going viral - internet business marketing has moved on. Do not look at it as an "internet marketing strategy", it is more than that, look at the collective and how to incorporate digital media into a holistic strategy.  For example, the YouTube video summarizing and showing the JZ and Bing decoded campaign, one of the best around in my opinion.

In saying all of this, know your target.  A shotgun approach in the dark will invariably fail and an activation flop will do more harm than good. Research, research and then a bit more research. So where does SEO fit into this equation? With a quality base of users driven from other sources of the internet, an activation technique is more likely to get better engagement. With poor quality leads and “clicks”; engagement levels are destined to be lower and activations harder to be a true success. Hence, the best internet marketing should always concentrate on quality. 

There is no one or the other with SEO and social media; and there is no one or the other when it comes to traditional and digital marketing; the moving dynamic means we are having to increasingly morph and adapt to the behavior of the internet population in all forms of internet marketing.