Facebook

Click to see MARION's Facebook page.

Facebook is second only to Google in number of visitors. A properly developed Facebook page can help you recruit new customers and maintain relationships with existing customers. If you are serious about social media marketing, you may even want to consider purchasing ads on Facebook. A fan page can also greatly aid your company’s SEO efforts. However, companies should only use this site if it’s appropriate to their overall goals and image.

Because of Google’s ‘nofollow’ code, Facebook doesn’t directlyaffect your website’s SEO. However, having a Facebook profile can have massive indirect SEO benefits, including:

• Facebook can be a great resource for generating brand awareness. Since it’s now popular with virtually every age demographic, the site can be where building your relationships with other businesses and prospects come together.
• Facebook applications can be a great way for communicating news and events. It can encourage engagement with your brand, your products or your services.
• Facebook can drive traffic to your site and other online properties. Your Facebook profile can now be indexed in search results and can provide another favorable listing in the organic search results of the engines.
• Facebook can be a lead generation tool and can be used to qualify existing leads. Evaluating other company profiles can help you build relationships with your prospects and support the lead generation qualifying process.

MARION can help you set up your company Facebook page, creating content and campaigns to increase your company's number of "fans".

Twitter

Click to follow MARION on Twitter

Twitter, one of the fastest growing social media sites, lets you stay in constant contact with your customers. Tweeting about a new product or service lets your company build stronger relationships with your clients or simply fill them in on what is going on around the office. A quick tweet with a URL can help move traffic to a preferred landing page on your site. Similar to Facebook, companies should only use this site if it’s appropriate to their corporate image and goals.

Twitter won’t directly affect your site’s SEO because of Google’s ‘nofollow’ code.  However, having a Twitter profile can benefit your company in other ways including:

• Think of Twitter as the newest type of social mixer to engage with your industry.
• Twitter allows a business to keep their brand out there for people to engage with.
• If your company blogs, you can use Twitter to promote your blog content. You can set up a feed to automatically post your blog post URLs directly to Twitter.
• Use Twitter to promote your press releases and company news. Twitter is another information hub that can help communicate information quickly.

MARION can help you set up your own Twitter account and instruct you on its uses for your business.

YouTube

Click to see our videos on YouTube

YouTube receives more searches than Yahoo! or Bing. Because of this, posting compelling content to the online video community can be a great way to connect with customers and to attract new ones. Even if your company can’t use YouTube to post promotional videos about products and services, you may be able to post short, recorded webcasts that can be used for investor presentations or e-learning. Once you have a video ready to upload, you can add SEO-friendly title and description tags.

Having a corporate YouTube channel can hold multiple benefits, including:

• The More Info section of a video is a great place to promote your brand with links back to your homepage and Facebook page.
• The video annotation feature can increase visits to your associated sites (homepage, Facebook page, etc.) by including a call to action. (“Click here to visit our homepage!”)
• YouTube can bolster your brand presence on search engines. By using proper SEO principles when adding keywords to your videos, you can gain additional search result listings.
• Since YouTube videos can be easily shared and even embedded in sites like Facebook by viewers, you have the potential to create a popular viral marketing campaign.

MARION can help you create videos for YouTube, establish your own channel on YouTube and optimize your video details for search engines.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) has become an increasingly useful resource, but can be difficult to implement properly and effectively. While traditional media typically allows only one-way communication of a company’s message, SMM generates an online conversation through social media channels. Messages spread from user to user in a grassroots way because they come from a trusted source, not straight from the brand or company.

There are several reasons why SMM is important, including:

• Provides useful information to customers about products and services in a more casual way
• Helps with Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Starts a conversation with prospects and continues the conversation with customers

For B2B clients, the MARION Integrated Marketing can help your business by focusing your SMM efforts on three main sources: Blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Where appropriate for B2C clients, MARION Integrated Marketing also includes Twitter and YouTube strategies among others.

Sites such as these provide SEO benefits for your brand and allow you to build relationships with your customer base.

Blog

Just because social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have been growing rapidly doesn’t mean blogs are out of style. Blogs are more important than ever, and they are here to stay. A blog helps connect a company to its customers and business partners. It provides an outlet for a company to establish a line of direct communication. Also remember that informative content from blogs can be recycled on email campaigns and company newsletters.

Keyword links from your blog to your other sites can help in SEO. Some of the benefits include:

• Most blog software offers uncomplicated URL structure, making it fairly easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl blog content.
• Links to RSS feeds that use the blog’s domain name can build link popularity. When RSS content is syndicated or cited by other blogs, any embedded links will also assist in sending traffic.
• Search engines reward fresh content with repeat visits. Regular blog updates mean your site is crawled more frequently, allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly. Fresh content is also more authoritative (and therefore often higher ranked) to search engines.
• An active blog community creates the kinds of citations or signals from other sites (annotated and contextually relevant links) that search engines tend to reward in the rankings. Loyal readers can boost a site’s visibility through advocacy on other blogs, on their own blogs and within the comments of your blog.

MARION can help you set up your blog design and template. If you wish, we can also manage your blog for you, writing articles and adding images.

LinkedIn

Click to see MARION's LinkedIn page

LinkedIn is geared solely toward professionals to offer a strategic networking experience. LinkedIn serves virtually every industry and profession, and both individuals and businesses can create profiles. It has 12.5 million small business users alone.

Creating a LinkedIn profile for your company can help in SEO. Some of the benefits include:

• LinkedIn is highly regarded by search engine giant Google and its pages are seen favorably when compared to other websites. Regular updates give better visibility and more credence in the eyes of Google.
• Your company’s public profile may be seen, indexed and returned within search results. LinkedIn may even provide multiple opportunities for your company to rank since every employee's profile can be an additional search result.
• The various functions of LinkedIn enable companies to maximize their SEO potential by sharing relevant information such as resumes, business opportunities, job vacancies, etc.
• Businesses can share information through their profile, providing the opportunity to “sell” the company’s profile to customers. The profile offers the opportunity for the company to market their goods as well as add links to their websites or blogs.

MARION can help you set up your own personal account on LinkedIn and/or add a company page.