Social Media Marketing Rules

How companies can tap the power of social media to promote your brand, communicate with customers, and increase the rank of your site.

Here are some simple rules that can help your company increase your internet exposure without spending money on expensive plugins.

• Host your own tools. When you host a blog, or a forum, or a photo album, at your URL, it’s use promotes the rank of your URL, as opposed to wordpress.com or flickr.com
• Use redirects and custom names with your URL in it. Stop promoting Twitter! Instead of using twitter.com/vandergrifftoyota setup the following vandergrifftoyota.com/twitter and redirect it to your twitter page. Thus, in your ads, you are promoting your website, not Twitter’s.
• Post content that is not related to your products. In the case of Car Dealerships, inventory spam is considered to be poor SEO practice. This is the case for any business.
• Engage your employees. In a 2009 study, the average American spent 4 hours a month on Facebook.[i] Employees can participate in Facebook pages, ‘like’ your site, and post the link to their wall once a day (will not take more than 30 seconds). If they are unwilling to do this, you may want to re-evaluate their employment.
• Engage your friends and family. Do not abuse their trust and spam their walls with your links, but keep them informed of your activities at your job.
• Use the free tools provided by Social Media platforms. Facebook allows the creation of pages, groups, and events for free.
• Host as much as possible on your site. Facebook provides many widgets that allow you to embed a lot of functionality onto your site. As much as possible integrate this into your site instead of redirecting traffic directly to Facebook.
• Use other Social Media. Facebook and Twitter are not the only social media sites in the world. Many other Social Media sites are more SEO friendly, have more tools offered to users, and have more propulsive niche communities. See Vector’s Blog Pleaseblogin.com for a list of Social Do Follow sites (a good start.)[ii]

Remember, social SEO is time consuming and must be done manually. While ‘they’ get to use automated software ‘bots’ – it’s not allowed for us. Using any form of automation can receive a multitude of penalties.

Vector Informatics develops SEO strategies for companies such as http://vandergrifftoyota.com and http://bluedotframing.com – for more information visit http://startvector.com