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Facebook (SEO) Optimization: Free Ways to Be Found on Facebook

By Li Evans

Reporting from Search Marketing Expo (SMX)

Lately Facebook marketing has become all the rage, especially for online marketers.  With that in mind I sat down in the Facebook SEO:  Free Ways to be Found on Facebook panel at SMX East 2010.  The panel was moderated by Elizabeth Osmesloski the editor for Search Engine Land and presenters were Marty Weintraub, Gregg Finn and Chris Silversmith

First to the stage was Marty, who had a deck that was just packed with data, so much so that I'll have to go back and digest that presentation to fully comprehend everything Marty was trying to relate in such a small amount of time.  Some key facts, tips and information I gleened from Marty's presentation were truly insightful.

When it comes to the "SERPs" of Facebook (if we want to call them that as search engine marketers) and mature Facebook accounts different factors like personalization and likes matter in what's brought back when a user searches in the Facebook environment.  There's a few things that affect personalization: you "like it", your friends "like it", you've got 2nd degree friends (not quite as relevant), you've been invited to things, you've visited the page before, and you've listed it as an interest on your profile.

Marty outlined 9 important ranking factors to consider when you are setting up your profile or pages/groups on Facebook, if you want them to rank in Facebook's search results.

1. Your Name
2. Events You Are Invited To
3. Friend with Keyword in Name
4. 2nd Degree Friend with Keyword in Name
5. Questions w/ keyword in it & # of Answers
6. App you have used
7. Page Friend Likes
8. Groups you have joined
9. Internal external page & Interest You Have on a Profile

The one place that seems to be the most "spammy" on Facebook that programmers are hacking and exploiting is Events.  Events are not geographically based, nor based on if your friends are attend, nor the invites and not really keyword based.  Spammers are using events to send emails to everyone on the attendee lists whether they've RSVP'd or not.  This is why people are ignoring events anymore.

The key to successfully marketing with the events is to get people to RSVP as ATTENDING and get people to the page at least once.  Don't forget to make your primary keyword the first word of the event and don't make that name too long.

Marty had so much more great information, if you are interested in it, follow him on twitter he's @aimclear.

Greg Finn was up next with another treasure trove of great tips for marketing in Facebook.  The key to making your pages rank is relevancy of the page name, the fans you have and also the conversations that are going on within those pages, according to Greg.  Greg also highlighted Facebook's Page Browser feature and how those factors affect what appears in the page browser.

When you are trying to boost your fans he pointed out some rather simple things marketers can do like making sure you have a "Become a Fan" button on your main website.  He also suggested running promotions, however you do need to consult Facebook's guidelines on promotions before you launch to avoid having Facebook shut down your promotion.

The best promotions that work are charitable donations.  This is where companies say "for every fan we acquire" within a certain time frame, they will donate a certain amount of money to a charity.  Greg suggested that companies can alter this and encourage more conversation because in order to comment on a fan page wall, you have to like it first.  So by running the promotion focusing on "for every comment on this post, we'll donate", you are getting both fans and conversation.

Chris Silversmith rounded out this panel with some other great insights, primarily utilizing your status updates in more effective ways.  If you utilize tagging, you can really improve your chances of increasing the number of people who see it.  For example utilizing people's names, groups, businesses, and locations can actually place your status updates on their walls, exposing that information to their fans/friends. 

You do want to be careful with this though because it can appear spammy and get ignored and also be ineffective if a group, fan page or community page only shows "their" updates and doesn't allow fans updates to be seen.  Remember as well, you can only use 6 tags in a status update.

Chris also gave some great tips about optimizing fan page code for facebook by using the Open Graph.  Open Graph code is based on RDFa and Chris pointed out that marketers should make sure to use the meta tags outlined in the Open Graph outline by creating special html pages on their own sites and synching them with the Facebook Fanpage.  You really only get one shot at this as once 10 or more people like it, Facebook won't change the information on the page you've synched.  To get Facebook to recognize your Open Graph coded page put the like button on the page and click it as the administrator of the fan page from that page.

This panel was so packed with great information, there's a lot more that I didn't cover here, as actually sitting in the panel is where you get the true benefit!  If you are interested in learning more, tweet to the presenters, they might help you out, or better yet attend SMX West in February 2011.

Don’t Gamble with Your PPC Campaigns! Save It For The Casinos.

By Account Deleted

In the lyrics of one of my favorite songs by Kenny Roger’s “the Gambler” which states that “you gotta know when to hold em…., Know when to fold em… No when to walk away…… Know when to run….  And it is those lyrics which reminded me of how easy it is to gamble with your PPC Campaigns, when "rash" decisions can really screw-up your bottom-line. (BTW - What the hell happened to Kenny Roger's Face? It looks like he gambled and lost with his plastic surgeon - See photo below) In this post, I will discuss why it’s important to “know when hold certain keywords and also “when to fold ‘em” or pause them. Just because a keyword may be under-performing, does not mean it’s a bad keyword. It just may bring attention to other areas of the PPC optimization experience (Landing Page, website usability or even the Text Ad). Let’s discuss

Not all keywords are the same for everyone. In my experience, I have seen other PPC Marketers and even myself at times, be guilty of not giving keyword a 2nd chance at life it deserves and it's very much like gambling with real money where the only difference is that your not bidding with Chips, your gambling with your business.

In my humble opinion, the best approach to managing keywords in the PPC Campaigns is to create  a small group of 10-20 “tightly” relevant Head Terms and Long Tail Phrases about that specific product or service. Depending on your analytics package, it is sometimes a good idea to identify a few head terms and leave them in either Broad or Phrase Match and let the user find the long-tail work for you. Once you have that setup, I would then monitor them closely a few times a day for a week at a time just to see the behavior.

A Few Behaviors would be:

• Click Thru Rate (CTR%)
• Avg Position Fluctuation
• Competitive saturation
• Eventually CPL/CPA.

Once you have a good idea of the winners and “non winners” – (Notice I did not say “LOSERS” because the under-performers may just have the wrong “intent” factor which is perfectly ok), segment them and start working on the ones that need a little more attention. The beauty of Paid Search is the ability for the search marketer to try all types of "last resorts" and test new things. Moreover, finding the ultimate “gold-mine” keywords are not always instant. It could take months to truly get a handle on how to continue the ROAS Success. So in comparing PPC to Gambling at the Casino, you are in effect,

1. Looking at your cards
2. Looking at the others players
3. Looking at the dealer’s cards
4. Deciding to FOLD'em or HOLD'em

The benefit of PPC is that you do not have to fold right away, you can try different tactics to truly determine if it’s a lost cause and/or stop the bleeding before the credit card company knocks on your door.

So what are some examples of Rehabilitation Tactics?
Certainly, there are many tools to utilize when you are forced to give these keywords a second and third chance at life in your campaigns.

1. Step #1: Look at all of the RAW search queries (through analytics) and see if there is a gap in the long tail searches. An example maybe adding a FEW MORE negative keywords to filter out unqualified visitors to keep the cost down and improve CTR to get your ROAS at the level it needs to be.
2. Step #2: Look at the keywords position. Perhaps the “quality score” effect is just not there, so you may want to drop a few cents of the maximum CPC.
3. Step #3: Look at your Landing Page and Website and looking for problems in your Conversion process. This could also be an issue with price, lack of information, shipping costs (if applicable) as well as anything else which may be affecting your ROAS.
4. Step #4: If on the Content or Site Placement Networks, run a referring sites report and add those sites that are driving up add spend and not converting to the Site Exclusion section within Google Adwords.

In Conclusion:
The bottom-line of this post is to highlight on the fact that PPC does not have to be a game of High Stakes BlackJack. The PPC Marketer has many options on the table and just needs to be conscious of the surroundings of the user experience to make a better decision. Many great PPC experts in the industry  have also been evangelizing on these similar tactics, techniques and strategies mentioned in this post. However, this SemGeek’s thought process is using all of these best practices and simply relating them to other types of behavior, whether you are gambling at the Casinos, or Fishing (That’s another analogy to write about) it’s all relative.

PPC marketing is dynamic in that sometimes you can “win by Knockout" in the first 30 seconds, but if you get knocked down more that 3 times in the same round, as a PPC Marketer you can still continue to analyze your opponent (client) and fight your way back to a successful campaign.

Online Marketing Tips Video: Online Reputation Management

By Li Evans

This week's online marketing tips video is all about online reputation management in social media and search marketing.  It's a little different look beyond just monitoring with Google alerts and buzz monitoring tools (the first tip).  Buy building relationships and loosing your grip, these tips can also help you with your reputation online.

Reputation Management Online Tips Video Transcript after the jump....

Online Marketing Tips Video: Link Building Strategies

By Li Evans

This week's video is all about some simple concepts you can incorporate into your link building strategy.  Wondering about those emails that claim they can get you thousands of links for paying a minimal fee?  How about why people link to you?  Or maybe your boss doesn't want you linking out to anyone. 

In this short educational video, 3 simple concepts are discussed to help get your link building campaign off on to the right start.

Full Video Transcript After The Jump....

What Jury Commissioners & Judges Could Learn by Taking a SouthWest Flight

By Li Evans

Yes, I know a rather bizarre blog post title, but bare with me and it will all make sense in just a short time.  This post, btw, is all owed to my ever creative buddy Donna Fontenot.  Always in the most bizarre situations Donna manages to challenge me to find a story out of my most bizarre situations.

So today, I had Jury Duty.

I was a grump, total absolute grump (ask my friend with the beautful hair).  I didn't sleep well, because I kept having dreams I missed Jury Duty and the Sheriffs were after me to come and serve.  So with lack of sleep, and a total lack of desire to do my civic duty, I headed down to the opposite end of my county.  I even managed to avoid some rather annoying traffic, so at least I didn't have road rage to add to my list.

After getting through security and checking my coat to some lady who was way to cheery for that early in the morning, I sat with about 50 other people in what I can only compare to a holding cell, with amenities and lots of "Don't Do This" signs.  We sat there for about 20 minutes till they "marshaled" us into the Jury Marshaling room.  There we got scanned in like produce, and told to go sit and wait some more.  Soon enough the Jury Comissioner came to the front of the room, gave a speech about this and that (very boring), showed us a video (very boring), then had a judge preach to us, finally wrapping up with more do's and don'ts.  It reminded me of the normal airline safety speech.

I've never heard the "speech" from the Jury Commissioner before.  I've never saw the video they showed before.  I never heard the speech from the judge that came to spoke to us before.  I'll never remember any of them either.  It all translated to me as "Blah Blah Blah".

After Donna challenged me, I got to thinking, wouldn't it be interesting to put the Judge and the Jury Comissioner on a Southwest flight and ask them to learn from it?  How can they get their potential jurors to not only really pay attention to the job at hand, but to CARE about what they are about to be entrusted to do?

How could they make the experience more beneficial not just for the jurors, but for all parties involved (I'm talking about lawyers, plaintiffs, defendants, etc.).  How can they make the experience seem like less of an inconvenience and a lot more tolerable?  Of course Government workers aren't marketers, and of course I know enough to be realistic that thinking like this from Government entities like this would not happen in my lifetime (but I could wish right? Obama did use Social Media, so there is SOME hope).

I also understand budgets are limited, and rules and regulations must be followed, but with what I expereinced this Jury Selection / Jury Duty process is more of a disservice to all parties involved and an actual civic duty. 

So I turn this around to marketing.  How do you get a totally disinterested audience, a grumpy audience, an annoyed audience to pay attention, listen, and most of all care?

I wrote about Getting Your Audience to Listen  by relating my with my flight on SouthWest story to you all.  You start by doing the unordinary.  That gets their attention, and it gets them to listen.  So instead of the Judge droning on about this being a privelege so you can have your driver's license and so you can vote, perhaps he should have likened the situation we were presently in to Law & Order .... and then stopped and said "that's really not how it works".  It would have gotten a lot more people to relate and understand, rather than a judge preaching/droning on.

How do you get them to react?  On my Southwest flight people actually applauded the the man who gave the safety speech.  Talk about an unusual reaction.  So how do you get your uninvolved, grumpy, uninterested audience to react.  Again, it goes back to doing the unordinary and unexpected.  In this case, the judge could have been more interactive, we expected him to "speak AT us", not hold a conversation with us.  Had he held a coversation, it would have been totally unexpected and more engaging and not been interrepted as "Blah Blah Blah" by 75% of the audience.

In this case it all starts with the Judge and the Jury Comissioner.  If they have a passion for the judicial process, they should express that!  The judge, by all accounts has a passion for the law, he wouldn't have ran for Judge if he didn't love it.  Instead of preaching, he should be demonstrating his passion.  Instead of thinking he has to be locked into this stoic and reserved personna, wouldn't it be of more value to say "this is why I love the law, this is why each and every day I'm amazed by what you as jurors can do to help ensure our judicial process keeps in check"?

If you love what you do, don't be afraid to share it, express it and turn that mundane "civic duty" your audience is being tortured with, into something extraordinary.

Think about it, are you expressing the passion for what you love to do (your business), with your audience?  Maybe that's why they aren't listening!

eMetrics: Search From Now On

By Li Evans

The last session of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Washington DC that I attended before hitting the road and heading back north to Philly was on the Acqisition Track, entitled "Search from Now On".  None other than my great friend Mike Grehan of Acronym Media was presenting.  If you didn't know, Mike's writing his 3rd book on Search Marketing, as well as a white paper about search engines and their new listening signals.

A Bit of Search History

Mike starts of by showing a slide of a quote from Vannevar Bush, then summarizing what was on the screen as "information can become lost and all over the place and it would be great to put it all together."

"As We May Think", is a piece that Vannevar Bush wrote that questions, instead of making the weapons of mass destruction, couldn't we instead create something great for mankind? 1945 Bush invented the fax machine, computer and the internet, MEMEX - is really the world wide web.

Bush argues that as humans we should turn our scientific efforts from increasing physical ability too making all previous collected human knowledge more accessible. Now take a look at Google today.  Google's mission is to organize the world's information to make it universally accessible and useful.

Getting Your Audience to Listen - Turning the Mundane Into Extraordinary

By Li Evans

"Attention ladies and gentleman, if you would reach forward into the pocket in front of you and pull out the safety instructions card, we will now go over the safety features of this aircraft....."

How many times have you heard that?  How many times do you tune it out?  How many times have you put your headphones on and turn up your iPod (if you're still sitting at the jetway), concentrate more on chapter 4 of the book you brought on board to read, put the ear plugs in and drift off to sleep as soon as that steward picks up that telephone intercom and starts reciting that safety speech on any major airline that you travel today?

"In the event of a water landing, your seat cushion can be used as a flotation device...."

Online Marketing Tips Video: Utilizing Video in Online Marketing Strategies

By Li Evans

Tuesday's Tips in Online Marketing for this week is a few days late, due to some technical difficulties, but we do have one!

This week's video on online marketing tips features tips on utilizing video in your online marketing strategies.  These tips can help you get the most out of your videos that you are uploading to the video sharing sites.

Full video transcript after the jump...

Online Marketing Tips Video: How to Get the Most Out of a Online Marketing Conference

By Li Evans

So while out at SES San Jose a few of the industry experts from around the globe helped me put together a special edition of "Tuesday's Tips in Online Marketing".  It was a lot of fun to put this together, expect for the part where my laptop decided it didn't want to cooperate with putting it together!

The topic of last week's tips in online marketing was "How to Get the Most Out of an Online Marketing Conference", so take a peek at what all these wonderful folks had to say.

There's no transcript for this video at this time.

How Do You Find Your Audience?

By Li Evans

"I get I need to go where my audience is, but how do I find them?"

I hear that question quite often, not just in my Social Media Training Classes, but from clients and even friends who are just venturing out into this world of online marketing.  "Where is my audience, how do I find them?!"  is asked, over and over again.

The other night I was sitting in the McDonald's drive through waiting on my  fries to be handed to me, and I saw classic car, after classic car pull by and then park further up in the parking lot of this McDonald's.  By the time I got my fries and went to pull out of the parking lot, over half the parking lot was filled with bright, shiny chrome, classic, muscles cars and some antiques, too.  There was even a smaller group of souped up imports forming as well.  Then it dawned on me, I saw this happening on really warm, clear Saturday nights in the summer at this McDonald's before.

There isn't a sign promoting this congregation of car enthusiasts to come to McDonald's, and McDonald's doesn't do anything to promote it either (perhaps though they should!).  So how do these car owners who love to hang out and discuss engine blocks, chrome and how fast they can get to 60 mph know to come to McDonald's when the conditions are right?

They asked a friend.

Unless you ask, you won't find your audience.  They aren't out there with signs pointing to them saying "Hey! I'm here come talk to me!"  And one word of caution, seriously, no matter how cool an advertising agency might claim that to be in a pitch to you, don't tread down that path. 

Asking a friend, and receiving a response is a form of word of mouth marketing.  You are taking the recommendation of your friend to go hang out with your fully restored 1965 Pontiac GTO Convertible (AKA "The Goat") at the MickyD's and that you'll get along with the crowd there because you have something in common.  You trust your friend, how or why would he steer you wrong?

The same goes for finding your audience online.  Ask your most loyal customers!  Say you are sneaker company launching  a new soccer cleat line and you want to know what's most important in a Soccer Shoe.  Stop and ask your loyal customers "Hey we're trying to find people who love Soccer to get their opinion on helping us develop a new shoe, is there some place you go online to talk about your love of sports (or Soccer)?"

You might be amazed at the feedback. 

There are other places you can ask too.  Ask a search engine, although they don't give impassioned responses as a human would, a search engine can return a list of forums or communities related to your interested, if you ask the right way.  You can ask your blog audience, Facebook friends, or even your Twitter followers (when twitter isn't down that is) and find new places every day.

The point is, you can't expect your audience to tell you where they are.  You have to ask, if you don't ask, you'll never know that they are hanging out at the local McDonald's on a Saturday Night!

*Top Photo Credit, Flickr User Poofy
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