Social SEO creates, plans, and executes social media campaigns for clients around the world. For over a year we have helped define the goals of clients and communicate those ideas across hundreds of social media websites.

Our social media services create connections with consumers while continuously building back links and other optimization along the way. From experience we know that the majority of consumers want transparency, relevance, personalization and congruence. Just showing up and contributing information or ideas is likely not enough. It's more about leveraging opportunities with communities of shared interests or strategically creating those communities if they don't yet exist.

Many social media campaigns transcend across department channels such as marketing, public relations and sometimes even customer service depending on the goals of the campaign. To effectively manage these needs, a social media agency must essentially be an extension of the client, involved with various communication channels within the client's organization in order to communicate the right content at the right time.

We just finished up a real quickie Drupal site conversion for FindNews.org, an older news domain I've owned for over 6 years. The site was running on DotNetNuke since late 2004 and needed to be converted over to something a little more intuitive for us to manage and more search engine friendly. Drupal was the obvious choice. So, we simply plugged in Drigg, the Digg-style Drupal module, to allow for the social voting functionality you'll notice on the site.

If anyone would like to benefit from this website and submit anything news worthy, please feel free to do so. You'll get some decent traffic if the news is worthy enough and you'll also receive a link back to your website. Previous to the site's conversion (several days ago) the daily visitors was ~8,000 to 12,000 per day and there are roughly 150 to 200 visitors on the site at any given time.

We still have some things left as far as cleaning up some of the design and functionality of this social news website, but for the most part the initial Phase 1 functionality is pretty solid. Let us know how you like it and feel free to leave any suggestions below or through the FindNews.org contact page. Thanks and enjoy!

Featured image: 

I finally took the plunge last week and signed up for a Twitter account. I resisted for quite some time, not wanting to add yet another distraction to my day in addition to phone, IM, live website chat support, and email.

More and more of my blogging circle was jumping on board so I asked them… what’s the deal – is this helping your business or just another major distraction?

A few said they’d seen a noticeable increase in blog subscribers since they started Twittering. One said that Twitter was directly responsible for some new consulting gigs. Others mentioned that Twitter provided them with a way to connect with some A-listers in a way that was not readily available before.

That’s when I decided to give it a try. But then I had some other concerns that went beyond just time…

Keep in mind that goal of this post is not to bash Twitter – I think it’s an important tool. But I do wonder if it may have adverse side effects if used carelessly.

The Potential to Kill Your Reputation

The relaxed conversational atmosphere of Twitter certainly breaks down communication barriers. But I think there is a tendency to become too relaxed, which could be dangerous – especially if you’re interacting on Twitter as way to foster business relationships.

With all of the great places to publish content online today, it very likely that you can secure multiple spots in the search engine rankings with your content. One place I’ve found that seems to be beneficial in terms of ranking in search engines is Slideshare.net.

Slideshare is a social media content site that allows you to upload, favorite, bookmark, tag, and comment on slide shows. Additionally, you can join groups, download slideshows, and are provided with code to embed or link to slideshows on your blog or website. Like any social media site, being an active networker on Slideshare by commenting, favoriting, joining groups, and linking to slideshows can boost your slideshow’s visibility and backlinks.

I stumbled upon the SEO benefits of Slideshare by accident after publishing a slideshow not for rankings, but for purely utilitarian purposes. Soon, I realized that the slideshow was ranking on page 1 of Google for a term with 1.5 million results. And that was without being active at all in the Slideshare community.

Featured image: 

HubPages is one of the "newer" social media content sites – and in my opinion, one of the most exciting. The most fascinating aspect of HubPages is the algorithm that determines an author's and an article’s "HubScore."

The HubScore is a number between 45 and 100 that "grades" an author’s social media influence and the influence of their hub (i.e. page of published content). What I find so fascinating about this HubScore is how accurate is in gauging the social media IQ of a Hubber and the social media value of his or her content.

Unlike other social media sites where new users are left to flounder around, wondering how to create effective content and how to become more influential, HubPages gives you a grade to let you know how on target you are in terms of being effective at social media. Your HubScore is calculated in real time. In fact, the HubScore can and does fluctuate several times a day depending on various factors.

Though HubPages doesn't specifically spell out the details of their algorithm, they do offer some critical tips for how to boost your HubScores. Putting these tips into practice not only increases your score on HubPages, but also provides social media newbies with valuable information about what it takes to become effective in just about any social media sphere.

Some of the things that will boost a HubScore include:

SocialSEO.com has been performing social media marketing before the term was created. Early on we have built successful social campaigns on platforms such as MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, and others.

With more than 50 currently popular social websites (as of Sept. 2008) that can drive continuous and relevant traffic to your website, finding which ones provide the best results and managing the day-to-day activity of each social website can be exhausting.

We currently provide viral marketing creation and social media management for clients around the world. Contact us today to find out more about how we can focus a social media or viral campaign to fit your business needs.