Wendy Boyce
As a B2B social media marketer, my primary focus is on developing relevant content. A secondary focus after that would be developing relevant content. Lastly, I focus much of my energy on developing relevant content. See a pattern? In the B2B social media landscape, content is king. Much of what I do revolves around the content our thought leaders produce as it pertains to the marketing solutions we provide and the vertical markets we serve.
Having a strategy in place for our social media efforts is critical to our success. To that end, I have laid out the 9 building blocks that form the foundation of my social media strategy. It is those building blocks that drive everything I do.
One of the fundamental building blocks is content. Once you have established goals and know who your audience is (or multiple audiences are) you should be able to build a content strategy and SEO plan to support that. I would caution B2B marketers who are publishing content… There should be a method to your madness. All the great content in the world is awesome, so long as people are finding it. There are a few elements to that – one is promoting your content effectively, but another is the long-term SEO strategy that will give your content a longer life cycle in organic search. Over time, if optimized and re-purposed properly, you can enjoy solid organic search position.
Search engine ranking does not happen overnight, and you should have a plan of attack based on a solid understanding of relevant industry search terms, competition and perhaps variations that may yield lower competition, and, ultimately higher ranking.
Keyword research is an essential part of this process in understanding which keywords or phrases will yield the best result.
Obviously we are not checking our keyterm rank daily, as it can change — daily — but to monitor the trending you should check it periodically on a cross-section of relevant terms. Watch for trends in similar terms that either gain rank or lose position. This information can be helpful in mapping out content needs.
When checking your website or blog’s organic search position, also keep an eye on other social sites you are leveraging as you check your ranking.
All of your social content re-purposed or pushed to other social networking sites also has the potential to gain organic search rank. This includes things like SlideShare decks, YouTube videos, Flickr images, social bookmarks on sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and so on. If you are pushing content out in those other channels, be sure that content is also properly optimized, from image naming to proper tagging, and that each of those social media sites provides clear information about your company’s products/offerings and how to get in touch with you.
Note: This is not a once and done thing. A common misconception is that you can load a website with keyterms and forget about it. Effective Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process that needs to be monitored and adjusted regularly.
Map out your content strategy and keyterm strategy and then focus on filling in the content gaps. Rinse and repeat as necessary.
About the Author:
Wendy Boyce is the Social Media & Marketing Manager at SIGMA Marketing Group, an integrated marketing analytics firm. Connect with Wendy on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.
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