How will social media 'trinity' affect you?

In my conversations with the Marketing Directors of many Singapore businesses, I am often told that Social Media Marketing is either ineffective or too costly and hence not worth the investment.

After hearing a quick overview of their existing social media strategy, I am often not surprised that they find social media ineffective as their social media strategy is (a) solely dependent on search engine optimization for traffic; (b) lacks synergistic action between social media platforms; and (c) does not capitalize on the strengths and limitations of each platform. I then share with them a simple framework that I have successfully used to help my clients establish their social media presence.

Social Media “Trinity”

Termed the Social Media “Trinity”, the strengths of this Framework is that it is low cost and it can be done with in-house capabilities. This makes it ideal for the small and medium enterprises. The Framework’s effectiveness stems from the fact that it capitalizes on the strengths (and limitations) of the various social media platforms; conforms to the way search engines operate; and uses knowledge of how people search for information and stay connected with the world.

Facebook. In the Trinity, Facebook is selected as the primary engagement platform as it is currently the dominant social media platform in the world (with over 600 million users and statistics showing that about half of these users logged-on on any given day) and because its user interface is specifically designed for the effective and efficient sharing of information among connections.

With the primary engagement platform selected, the next step is to build the organization’s fan base. This is important as, besides enabling you to “converse” with, and hence engage your fans, building a fan base also establishes an electronic direct mailing list for you to promote your organizations product and services.

Blogs/ Websites. Unfortunately, search engines do not readily index and rank Facebook posts and the only way to build fans is to redirect them from a “feeder” source. This is where blogs and websites come in. Well written blogs (or Search Engine Optimized Websites) which comprise selected keywords will be ranked high by search engines like Google and Yahoo. As web searches is now the preferred way for people to learn more about a product or service, a higher page ranking will translate into higher impressions and conversely higher click-through rates.

Twitter. Now, this is the tricky part. As search engines have a complicated algorithm to determine what is relevant, it may take some time for your blog postings to be ranked high. Fortunately, the readership (or hits) of your blog pages plays a part in determining page ranking and this is where the final part of the Social Media “trinity” comes into play – Twitter. Twitter is immediate, it is not affected by search engine filtering and anything you post will be broadcast. A well composed tweet with a link to your blog posting can therefore generate tremendous viewership. Thus, regular tweets promoting your blog page will increase its perceived relevance to search engines which will in turn increase your page ranking, which will then increase the number of views to your blog page and consequently the number of people who will be invited to join your Facebook page.

There you have it. A simple, but highly effective, social media strategy to increase your organization’s social media presence.