Using Social Media to Market Your Company

I read a column on SearchEngineWatch.com today by Mark Jackson where he suggested an easy way to use social media sites to market your company. He sasy that the new social media sites offer many ways to drive visitors to your own website. They offer new marketing media that could really help you grow. Maybe you already have a LinkedIn profile or a Facebook account. Both these social media sites are very popular: Facebook has over 140 million active users and is growing by about 600,000 users a day, and LinkedIn has more than 30 million users.

Maybe you already use these sites to network, but since these sites are becoming so popular, you may also want to think about reserving your brand name on them.

You don't necessarily have to be active on the Web sites; however, it's important to reserve your name and fill out your profile for furture use. Mark suggests you start with the following sites: Twitter, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Digg, reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others like MySpace and YouTube. Also, look at User Name Check to see where your brand is and isn't registered, and claim the ones you can. If you're overly enthusiastic, take a look at Wikipedia's social media list.

Then he described three sites which are very useful for getting links back to your site:

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the social networking tool for business. Each of your company's employees can create an individual profile and network with others.

Once you register and log in, click on the "Account and Settings" link at the top of the page. Click on "My Profile." On that page, you'll see a section called "Websites." Click on the "edit" link and you will come to another page that allows you to edit your Web sites.

Select the "Other" option and then use a descriptive phrase to describe the Web site that you're linking to (good "SEO friendly" anchor text). You can also link to an internal page on your Web site. Need ideas for what link text to use? Look at your home page's title tag and use one of the keywords your Web site is targeting.

Digg

A link from your profile at Digg provides some SEO value. After you log in, go to your profile page (www.digg.com/users/username) and click on the "Add a Bio & Links" link in the "About" section.

You can also go directly to the settings page and scroll down to the "Links and Contact Info" section to add the links. Use a description that makes sense for each link you add. Include your main keyword phrase if possible.

If you don't have more than one Web site to list, add a link to your Web site's home page and an interior page. If a few employee of your company have Digg profiles set up, try to coordinate the links so you get more links to multiple interior pages.

BusinessWeek Business Exchange

Businessweek's social bookmarking community, Business Exchange, is helpful for SEO purposes. If you have a LinkedIn profile set up, you can integrate your LinkedIn profile with your Business Exchange profile and add up to three links in your Business Exchange profile. These also include your preferred descriptive text or anchor text.

Once you register and log into your Business Exchange profile, navigate to your profile and click on the "edit your profile" link. Scroll down to the bottom "Links" section and select the "other" option. Enter the title and URL. Enter links to the home page of your site using your preferred keyword phrase as well as links to some other important pages on your Web site.

While many social networking opportunities allow you to enter a link back to your Web site in your profile on their site, the opportunities to gain SEO benefits from these links vary from site to site.

LinkedIn, Digg, and BusinessWeek's Business Exchange offer good SEO opportunities. It's important to participate in these communities on a regular basis; the more you participate the more "popular" your profile will become, which will only help your SEO efforts.

I can definately vouch for Linkedin and Digg. I'm going to try the BusinessWeek Business Exchange profile now!