Getting started in Social Media Marketing can be overwhelming, not just how your business should be doing things, but also determining what Social Media Tools will be most effective in assisting you to achieve your business goals and objectives.

Your Social Media Marketing Program should be initiated gradually over an extended period of time to evaluate the Social Media tools and methods being used. Additional Social Media tools should only be added as you and your employees become confident in the currently used networks. Upon determining how effective the tools used have been in your Social Media program, you can choose to make additions.

Jumping into Social Media with all the bells and whistles is not recommended, not only will it be difficult to determine what is and what isn't working, it has the potential to wreak havoc with your primary business activities.

The First Step - Social Media Tools Selection:

The first step in developing your Social Media Program should be a Social Media SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). When the SWOT analysis has been completed, it is then time to select the tools and methods for your Social Media implementation.

Although there is an endless selection of tools available, I recommend implementing only two primary tools in the initial stages of your Social Media program; Blogging and Social Networking. Once these tools have been proven as being affective for your company, then will be the time to branch out and initiate additional methods of Social Media interaction.

I would have difficulty prioritizing Blogging over Social Networking, both of these Social Media tools are equally important and both support the efforts of the other. When used in conjunction, these tools will be your primary Social Media tools of your Social Media Program.

Blogging: The blog is one of the most powerful Social Media Marketing tools you have available to promote your business and interact with your web site visitors. Blogging is an effective Social Media Marketing technique, the time spent developing and promoting your business' Blog will undoubtedly have a positive effect on your Social Media program.

Social Networking: Social Networking is where it all happens, it is the meet and greet of the online world. The choice of Social Networks is constantly increasing and therefore, care must be taken when selecting the Social Network/s you decide to use as part of your program.

I say chose wisely because to become a valuable member of your community will take time, there is no point in joining and not interacting with other members. Develop your reputation and developing a good relationship with your contacts prior to progressing to other networking opportunities, and then only when you are sure you have the time to make the commitment to an additional Social Networking community.

The Second Step - Engage your Customers and Prospects:

Without doubt Social Media has enabled consumers to talk about the products and services of any business or company they desire. In fact, there is absolutely nothing your business can do to control these conversations however, Social Media does enable you to influence the conversations taking place by participating. Social Media is not just about networking, becoming recognized as a publisher of high quality, relevant content is an important part of any Social Media strategy. You will need to define the content for your business niche and build content around your specialties and expertise to be able to influence the conversations within your niche.

Become a Thought Leader:

Becoming a thought leader is not solely about promoting your business or products in a sales manner, it is about interaction, communication, and most importantly listening to what your customers and prospects have to say and what is important to them enabling your communication techniques to your niche marker.

There are a number of methods to achieve this such as encouraging comments on Blogs and Social Networking forums, discovering and listening to the top influencers within your niche, plus using web sites such as Survey Monkey to gain an understanding of what is important to those interacting in your business niche.

It is only when you have a clear understanding of what is important to your community and what consumers are saying within your niche that you are able to begin to understand the social environment will enough to develop content and interact within the community in an influential manner.

The Third Step - Monitoring Results:

As with any business promotional initiative ensuring and measuring results is imperative. If this is not done it will be difficult to determine what works and what does not and in the current economic environment any wastage of time or financial resources must be minimized.

Measuring the effectiveness of Social Media is not as straight forward as some would like due to the many aspects unable to be measured without extensive marketing research because much of the programs success will be measured on customer experiences, such as: 
 
•Customer satisfaction
•Improved communication
•Better service response
•Higher brand perception

However there are aspects of your Social Media Program which you can monitor effectively which will provide an indication of the effectiveness of your Social Media Program including:

•Web site and blog traffic monitoring with a web analytics program
•Number of comments on Blogs and social conversations
•Number of mentions your business obtains in the social environment

The Last Word:

It must be noted that the above is a highly simplified overview of the business requirements of Social Media however, starting Social Media with an understanding of theses basic steps will ensure you develop the foundation required to develop a Stellar Social Media Marketing Program which is able to grow into a powerful toolset for your business.

Stellar Blue Web Design has internet marketing professionals on staff to solve all your Social Media needs and get your company or organization found on the internet. To get started on your Stellar Social Media Marketing Program, give us a call at 920-905-0250.

Jim Dobinski - Marketing Director
Stellar Blue Web Design, LLC
Visit Jim's LinkedIn profile.

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How Search Engines Work

One of the facts about search engines is that they utilize software programs known as bots or spiders that crawl the web and build their database. These spiders are sent to view and index pages which are later processed and retrieved from the database. If ranking on top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) is crucial for you, then it is important you understand the basics of creating a search engine friendly website.

Below it is explained in detail as to how a search engine works.

Crawling:
Firstly, search engines crawl the web to gather information and build their database. This is done by an automated software called a search engine crawler or spider or a bot. These spiders crawl through a site and look at the content (mainly text) to know what the site is about and then start collecting, parsing and storing the data so that it can be easily be retrieved from its database.

However, since there are over a billion pages on the web, it is practically impossible for a spider to revisit a site on a daily basis only to see if a new page has been added or an existing page has gone through any modification. Many times the spider may not visit your website for a month or more also, therefore, the true impact of SEO efforts cannot be known immediately.

It is also good to know that search engines are mainly text driven and are oblivious to images, sounds, flash movies, java script, frames, directories, and similar stuff. Therefore having lots of these on your website may not be very helpful from the SEO point of view as these will not be crawled and indexed for further processing.

Search Engine Indexing:
Once a page is crawled, the next step involves indexing the content. This process entails finding those words that can best describe the webpage content and then assigning the webpage to specific keywords. The indexed page is then stored in the huge database for retrieval later. At times, the search engine may not be able to correctly identify the meaning of the page and in such a case optimization of the page can help it classify it rightly and achieve a better ranking for you.

Processing:
This is done when a user enters a search query – in simple terms, the search engine analyses the information it has indexed in relation to the search request. Since there will be millions of pages containing the same search term, the search engine calculates the relevance of each page in its database to the search query.

The relevancy of a page is calculated based on various algorithms. These algorithms assign different weights for general aspects like Meta Tags, Keyword Density, and Links. However, one basic truth that you need to know is that all major search engines regularly change their algorithms and if you want to continue to appear on the top of the search results, you need to keep your pages up to date. Also, it would be a wise decision to think about SEO to rank on the top and also gain an edge over your competitors.

Retrieving:
This is the last step in the process where the search engine retrieves the results, that is, it throws up all the relevant results before the user. The uses can see a vast pool of information related to their search query.

There may be questions regarding how differently each search engine functions. However, one basic thing that you need to know is that there are differences in the manner various search engines function but at the end of the day they all perform three fundamental tasks:

1) Searching the Internet based on the search query entered by the user.
2) Maintaining an index of all the information that gather from various pages.
3) Permit users to search for words available in that index.

For additional information or to have your questions answered, give us a call at 920-905-0250. We'd be happy to help you construct a SEO process that turns your website from passive to Stellar.