Social Media, Branding, and SERPs
There's no shortage of buzz these days around using social media to manage both your brand name and public image. Indeed, just today we talke about the 6 Rules of PR 2.0, and a few days ago we discussed How to Blog Toward a Positive Image.
It appears, however, that social media has a use beyond influencing what it is said about you and how people respond to that discussion. Essentially, third party social media sites can be an invaluable tool in influencing the content of search engine results pages. As Cameron Olthuis at Pronet Advertising writes:
If there is one thing that social media has taught us it's that user created content ranks very well in the search engines. You can hardly do a search anymore without noticing at least a couple of social media sites within the top 10 listings of a search and even more so by the day. [...]
The reason why I bring this up is that it is a very important part of reputation management. Many of these social media sites allow users to register and pick a customer username that also ends up being a custom URL for the profile on that site.
For example:
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/YourName
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/YourName
Wordpress: YourName.Wordpress.com
You need to be securing the proper usernames and URLs on these sites and you need to do it fast. Just like there are domain squatters there are also squatters for the best profile names on the most popular social media sites.
Granted, explaining to your boss why you've registered a MySpace account for the company can be a sticky business, but Cameron provides a pretty solid rationale for doing so. Owning the 1st page of search engine results on your company's name is an important step in controlling both your PR and branding strategies, and you should really read the Complete Post for some more detailed insight.
If you're still having trouble convincing your superiors or partners on the venture, however, you might want to check out Ed Lee's tips on how to pitch social media better.
Related Posts
6 Rule of PR 2.0
How to Blog Toward a Positive Image
Comments
Social media sites also provide a good way to establish quality, trusted link backs VERY quickly. My site, http://adgridwork.com, was featured on digg and reddit back in December and to this day, the posts on those sites rank within the top 10 results for common search queries related to my site. Each day, Ill get about 10-15 visitors that happen to find my site through these services. Nothing ground breaking, but it provides some good, residual traffic from trusted sources.
Nick
http://adgridwork.com
[Editor's Note: There was a little tagline here that promoted Nick's site. We're sorry, but we had to cut that part out. It's nothing personal Nick, but we did let the two links through.]
Posted by: Nick | March 9, 2007 10:40 PM
Certainly some food for thought here. I’ll have to take a look at my search engine marketing mix and see how I measure up. Thanks for an excellent article!
Posted by: Search Engine Marketing | July 3, 2007 10:41 PM