Which to prioritise: Social Media or SEO?

I thought of this when I was discussing with my brother about social media and SEO (search engine optimisation). For your information, he’s the entrepreneur of an online game publishing company in Jakarta, Indonesia (like Blizzard & Aeria Games, but locally). Of course with me and my passion for social media, I was totally pushing the idea that social media is quintessential for the success of his business, but he rebutted that by saying that it’s just a tool to gain better SEO. He started investing in SEO recently and have been gaining lots of traffic to his website and he pretty much ditched social media efforts for SEO, which of course I totally disagree to!

Social Media

First of all, what do you actually do when you have a social media job or responsibility in a company? Well, grabbing information from TCO, they say that you collect and monitor data, insights and trends along with analysing them and creating content based on the information. What will be the results of this? Increased audience engagement and interaction, plus hopefully better customer retention and brand loyalty as a result of it. Also, did I mention possibilities of viral word-of-mouth? All sounds good huh? But then why SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

93% of all internet traffic comes from search engines, and Google dominates all! Now tell me, what site do you use to test whether your internet is working or not? Well I don’t know about you, but a few millions of other people and myself go to Google.com. What exactly is SEO? Wiki says it’s “process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine‘s “natural,” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”), search results.”. Basically, they’re the methods to make your website or whatever appear on Google better. It makes the world so much better by having Facebook.com appear when you search up Facebook because you’ve forgotten the URL (…really?). A great example of the use of SEO is shown below for Blender – where when you Google it, it’s not the appliance that pops up as first.

It’s quite annoying when you’re actually looking up a blender.

So.. how does SEO and social media relate?

Although there are many methods such as black hat ways (you can check it out on Wikipedia here), SEO can mainly revolve around content (white hat), and social media fuels that. As you can see in the picture above, YouTube videos come up too. Try Googling your own name and you”ll also find that retweets, tagged photos, Facebook statuses and so on appear too. The question is, which do you prioritise? SEO is your car, and social media is petrol.

Focusing on SEO

Many companies focus on SEO (e.g: my brother) because they really do increase traffic by stacks. But so what? I mean, what’s the point if you gain traffic but it doesn’t provide you with any real benefit or effect to your profits or at least customer conversion rate? I’ve checked out my brother’s reports and found out that although traffic was very much increased, his CTR (click-through-rate, basically clicks and activity in relation to the traffic) was quite low. So people do check his website out, but they probably don’t spend too much time on it and move on to something else, possibly due to content (I haven’t checked on my brother’s full analytics to completely prove this though). With this in mind, it doesn’t seem that my brother’s SEO endeavours were contributing much to profits or customer acquisition. Another thing is that there may also be possibilities of negative content appearing when searched – that’s something you wouldn’t want.

Focusing on Social Media

Okay, so if focusing on SEO isn’t realistically effective.. what about social media then? Well, content creation requires much more effort, time and also money as compared to SEO since it’s not really something that can be automated. Plus, if you’ve managed a company’s social platforms before, you’ll realise how hard it is to get customers tweeting or even just ‘liking’ your stuff (although I’ve posted some hints on increasing engagement on Facebook here). Therefore, it may not produce the same amount of exposure as you would if you invested more in SEO, and it’s quite unpredictable too.

Justification

It’s really a hard choice. Here’s a chart that might help, but don’t put your bets on it.

I don’t know the reasons behind their decisions to invest more in SEO, but my thought is that SEO is something that provides at least tangible and definite results (the traffic and all) while social media is much more complex to handle.

I personally believe that conditions would be different for varying industries and markets. So, how about using Google Analytics to check out your main driving force between SEO and social media? See which one produces more results, but then again take into consideration the correlation between both methods to your real profit generation. For the online gaming industry, this would be graphing traffic from SEO and social media platforms in relation to the number of account sign-ups (I’ll be doing this for my brother’s company soon, I might post up some insights I get from it).

In conclusion, it really is a dilemma! You wouldn’t know that a book has good content if it doesn’t really get exposure out there. Yet at the same time, if you hear about a book but then find out that it actually sucks.. it’s the same thing (I’m sorry, but I did that with the Twilight series). Ultimately, all I can say is that search engines are integrating social data into their results and the appropriate optimisation of both SEO and social media is required for utilising the online digital world in general. The only big no-no is to ditch one for the other!

What about you? What do you think is the best way to optimise both SEO and social media? Tell your stories of utilising the two features too!

Sources used:

http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com/2011/07/27/some-quick-handy-stats-about-social-media-and-lead-generation/

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/10-stats-to-justify-seo/36762/

http://mashable.com/2009/04/15/social-media-seo/

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/search-vs-social/

You can contact me via e-mail at rusli.christina@gmail.com
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Insights to Facebook fan engagement based on statistics

For utilising Facebook as a platform to connect with consumers, you may hear general advices such as “post relevant stuff!” or “post statuses that ask questions!”. Of course, these pointers are great, but they don’t tell you specifically the how and what. In 2011, Buddy Media released statistics and research relating to Facebook. I’ll be interpreting the data that they have collected in my own way to help those of you who are stumped in trying to get your fans engaged and interacting. I’ve actuallyused these insights – and they work!

WHAT

Length

Why do you think people use Twitter and sometimes even prefer it over Facebook? Because it’s microblogging. Note - micro. People stumble upon information either deliberately (reading a marketing book for an exam) or randomly (“I’m bored – I’m going to browse my News Feed”) and it’s very unlikely that a person who’s not intentionally looking for something about the history of Australia would read a whole 800-word wall of text about its discovery and whatnot. Why? It takes up too much brain effort. Another possible reason is that the shorter a post is, the better isolation it receives in terms of positioning – similar to how ads tend to emphasise their product by utilising space  .

No, this isn’t an ad for Hush Puppies. It’s an ad for ABC Radio produced by TCO!

Content

Okay, so the “post statuses that ask questions!” is right. In my own theory, I believe customers tend to engage more with questions because it’s easier for them to come up with a comment! We need to place ourselves in the shoes of a very lazy fan who wants the least of efforts to gain optimal benefit (wow, that sounds really bad when you word it out). It’s easier to come up with something to type to “do you like ice-cream?” as compared to “Ice-cream.”. Non-questions are usually very broad while questions actually narrows down possible responses.

You know what’s even more awesome than questions?

“Out of Moove’s many flavours, my favourite is ______”. Even more simpler to answer! However, you also have to consider than if your fill-in-the-blanks are too complicated, people might just not be bothered doing it at all. I kind of did that mistake. A way to make sure you’re doing the right thing is to try answering the post yourself and personally measure how difficult or how much effort it requires to fill the blanks. For my example, I could easily say “Out of Moove’s many flavours, my favourite is chocolate” . Also, consider the number of words that might be used to answer it. DON’T take out the blank! I did this mistake too. My theory is that the blank helps the audience to visualise their answer in accordance to the reification part of Gestalt’s theory, which generally states that humans tend to generate whatever’s missing in an object to make it seem whole – yeah, we have some sort of automatic fill-in-the-blank system.

You see a spiky ball.. but wait – the ball isn’t even there! Very trippy.

Numbers

If you happen to want to tell about a discount or sale of sort, don’t have customers do the math – their brain needs a break! I haven’t really applied this yet because I haven’t found the right situation to do so. The research also says that words such as “sale” and “% off” receive the lowest engagement although they’re ironically the most popularly used. So, start typing “we’re taking $10 off for our winter sale!” rather than “our clothes will be 20% off for our winter sale!”. A theory I’ve come up with for this behaviour is because the audience see “% off” so much that they’ve tend to dismiss it sometimes, or maybe using “$ off” grabs just their attention since they thought it was the actual price!

Format

Yep, status-only scores high with just single photos right below it. I’ve been observing this for the last few years and it’s definitely true. It’s because statuses are simple and are text-only and easy to understand. The only reason I can think of as to why it’s higher than that of single photo in engagement is because photos are just, well, photos. They tell a story, but sometimes not something that can be commented about easily (though I think they’re ‘liked’ more easily). I think I need my own research! What do you think? Photos grab attention more easily, but why are they less engaging than statuses?

HOW

Frequency

Fii, my partner in media for TDV also was saying in one of our weekly meetings how a few of her friends were saying that we were updating way too much that it was annoying! Uh-oh! Back then, we updated 2-4 times everyday, no wonder! Quality over quantity! If you check out the big brand pages out there, they don’t post everyday. They at least have intervals of a few days in between their posts. If you post more than once everyday, you’ll be constantly appearing on your fans’ News Feed. It is actually good to the extent that fans will see that you’re active, but on the other hand it may also appear spammy. There’s also the possibility of your audience feeling hesitant to engage because they’ll think that they’re the ones who are going to seem spammy if they’ve already interacted in with on of your previous posts and do it again (I personally feel that way sometimes).

Timing

Timing of your post is very important – just as important as how you need to roster more staff for the peak hours of a restaurant! So Wednesday is the best day to post your stuff and updates. Why? Well maybe it’s because of the fact that it’s in the middle of the week that’s a day after hectic Monday and two more days towards the weekends. The busiest days are over, but it’s not just quite the time to spend the night outside and come back next morn, so maybe people just decide to log on to Facebook.

For the specific times..

I’ve tried posting at 7 AM and it does work sometimes, but 8 PM seems more viable. It slightly depends on your audience demographics too, but applies to the general public. A good way to confirm the ideal time to post is by observing your Facebook chat list if you’re part of your brand’s demographic. I’ve done this for the past few days and noticed that as compared to the average of around 60 people online at 6 PM, about 90 of my friends are online by 8 PM. DON’T post on Fridays! I tried recently because I was curious, and I confirmed that it really is a bad day to post.

Conclusion

Remember that whatever you post, ensure it’s relevancy and that it’s in-line with your brand’s personality and essence. Here’s a summary of everything in this post:

What:

• Post statuses (no links whatsoever)
• That asks a question
• OR even better, fill-in-the-blanks!
• That are less than 80 characters long (less than 40 is even better!). Here’s a website I use to help me do this: Lettercounter.
• And if you’re going to promote a sale of some sort, use “$ off” rather than “% off”

How:

• Post once (or twice if really needed) a day
• From once to four times per week
• On most ideally Wednesdays but other days such as Sundays also work, although you might have to do it away from your office if it’s actually your job. Other days are fine, just not Fridays.
• At times between 8 PM and 7 AM (I personally recommend between 8 PM and 10 PM). Do however be reminded that slight changes might need to be made to cater to your brand’s demographics. Don’t forget to use your Facebook messenger/chat!

Have you applied these strategies before? How did it go? Oh and again – why do you think status-only posts acquire more engagement than single photos? Voice out your opinion in the comments! Hope you found this post useful!

You can contact me via e-mail at rusli.christina@gmail.com
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TDV: Shoes for Shoeless – the MMM perspective

Right now, TDV is promoting a cause we call Shoes for Shoeless (SFS). It is a movement to provide children in Indonesia – who have heard of shoes, but have never owned a pair in their life – with shoes. Let’s cover some aspects to it shall we? From perspectives of management, marketing and media (MMM).

 

Origins of idea

One day, my cousin here in Sydney was talking about how another one of my cousins in Jakarta (Indonesia) was supporting a charity cause. This cousin of mine is a retailer who imports children’s shoes and caters towards the high-end market, and his brand is called CooGee Kid’s Shoes.  If you’ve decided to click on the link, you’ll see that he’s quite successful judging from the 16,000 likes the brand received. The actual charity group is called Langkah Kasih (Step of Compassion), which is formed by a band of yougn entrepreneurs in the footwear industry and CooGee is a part of it.

Anyway, so I heard about it and I thought “hmm, TDV isn’t really doing anything at the moment and everyone is in exam periods. What if we do something that’s good and simple enough for university people to participate in?”. There was also the fact that I was going back to Indonesia on the 25th of June and therefore be able to transfer and convert whatever donations we receive then.

 

Management

As the one who came up with this idea, it can be said that I’m pretty much the project leader of this whole thing. Before starting the whole thing, I wanted to make sure that our results will be evident and visibile, which is crucial for a society that is based online in addition to the activity being remote. I contacted my cousin in regards to this, and asked him if we could put TDV stickers on some of the shoeboxes that we  contribute from our collected donations, and have the personnels take a picture of it for us to share on our network. He said we could if it’s just a few, but to be sure I contacted Langkah Kasih directly through e-mail, but they weren’t too keen on the idea. Instead, they said that they’ll have the kids hold up a banner of TDV instead but that’s actually quite an additional cost for us. I’ve yet to talk to them about it further (they haven’t replied to my e-mail), but we’ll be meeting up once I’m in Indonesia to see what they can do. It’s great that their supporting us in our efforts! Oh, and another thing I’d like to mention is that our stickers will be produced in Indonesia which is much, much cheaper. It’s such a good thing that I’m going back to Indonesia for a few weeks!

 

Marketing

Theoretical stuff

I’d like to mention our positioning for this whole scheme. If you think about it, donating to provide shoes for kids isn’t quite relevant to TDV , which is all about dancing and busking – except for the charity part. In order to make it fit towards our whole brand proposition, I decided to market the SFS differently by emphasising the relationship between shoes and dancing. In our description and on several statuses and updates made on social networks, I’ve repeated the words and association of “dance” and “shoes” – or “kicks” for a more hip hop feel. These included sentences such as “give these kids shoes to dance in” and “dancing without kicks is bad enough”. Here’s also another technique that I’ve adopted in accordance to the frequency effect theory (showing stimulus at a high rate of frequency in order to increase customer familiarity): repeating the words “shoes” many many times and also playing around with it. Don’t believe me? Just count the number of “shoes” there are in the event description. In addition, I also used the sentence “imagine if you were in their shoes” because it just fits so well. Also, I’ve also incorporated many emotional elements to the whole campaign, even for the event picture. I used a sepia setting to associate reminiscence and also attach some kind of dramatic effect. For the description, I’ve outlined diseases that are linked to going barefoot and how it affects children’s opportunities and lives in general. To convince, I’ve pulled out data and statistics from reliable sources (not just Wikipedia) through  a quick research and even provided proper referencing! The only thing that’s a turn down is that it’s quite a wall of text – the whole description. I tried to play it down through the usage of headings.

 

General

We’ve marketed mainly through social media and OOOH and idea popped up just then (literally, as I was typing) – I’ll be trying to achieve more exposure through D2MG newsletters. If you check out the SFS event page, you’ll see that we’re not doing too bad. I believe word of mouth played a huge role in this whole scheme, because honestly many of the random people I talked to who are somehow connected to the dance scene have heard of the movement. Additionally, it also helped that I pitched in front of my church about the whole project and many people donated towards it. I’ve also encouraged the board members to do similarly by sharing on their individual societies’ group walls, posting on their statuses and also by simply liking activities and such – which actually has a huge effect on reach. In terms of partnerships and such, we’ve managed to garner the attention of several main dance studios around Sydney through connections and just simple Facebook messaging. Some of these include Crossover Studios, Dancekool and Hip Hop Legacy (online hip hop magazine).

 

Media

General

I went full out on our social networks to promote the movement. Of course I’ve done the general stuff such as pinning it on TDV’s timeline, but I’ve also been endorsing the hashtag #ShoesForShoeless. Although not as much on Facebook, I’ve been utilising TweetDeck to time tweets appropriately from the collection of statistics from Tweriod and also a survey done that showed engagement and reach is optimised at non-peak hours between 8:00 PM and 7:00 AM (I got this from Jeff Bullas’ blog post). Furthermore I’ve also been pushing the hashtags #charity and #philanthropy on TDV’s Twitter a lot as a way to target certain people, and I also incorporated the “ReTweet” strategy by tweeting “RT to raise the awareness of kids in Indonesia walking tens of kilometers without shoes. Let’s change lives on.fb.me/L8y86d #charity“.

 

The Twitter Contest

Right now we have a Twitter contest running, one that asks to provide a creative answer to a question related to our whole scheme. The answer also required you to hashtag #ShoesForShoeless and #TDV, and the winner will have $20 paid by TDV donated towards the cause under their name. In theory, it sounds great but implementation is harder than I thought – it’s so hard to get people participating! In response to this, I have devised a plan! I created a standardised text for the board members to copy and paste to their statuses for them to post, and all of us will like each other’s statuses to ensure maximum reach. Another thing is that this text is only around 60 words long, so it’s fairly quick and easy to read. I do however plan to chop this down further to less than 80 characters since it is proven that posts with less than 80 words receive greater engagement, and even better if less than 40!

The SFS scheme will end on the 25th of June. For the moment, this is what I’ve done . I’m thoroughly enjoying this as it progresses! It’s very intriguing to explore what works and doesn’t, how some strategies fail and coming up with a back-up plan.

You can contact me via e-mail at rusli.christina@gmail.com
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The Dancevengers (TDV) – Starting the Journey #1

TDV didn’t just magically pop up out of nowhere, and it’s not something that everyone suddenly knows about! Even the board members, wouldn’t you wonder how we formed our team – the S.H.I.E.L.D to our heroes? (Although TDV is a spin-off of The Avengers, I assure you that we’re in no way related.. Well not anymore).There’s a story I’d like to share about TDV – how it all started and the beginning of everything. I’ll separate it into a series of posts so you peeps don’t go “OMGTLDR” (Oh My God Too Long To Read). Here’s the first one:

 

Me, the person who built castles in the air

I’ve always wanted to give back to the community, but didn’t know how! I love dancing, and I’ve been managing my hip hop society D2MG for a few months now. What do you know, I can actually contribute a lot to the development of D2MG! But that’s under the guidance of all the other executive members, and the president approving all the final decisions. Back then, I thought that some people were just meant to for great things. 

That was how things were – until I talked to it about my other friends. I told my D2MG members about it, and they loved the idea! Especially Oscar, Nancy, Peter and last but not least – my boyfriend .

 

My supporters – lovely lovely lovely people

• Oscar: At lunch break, we decided to chill about it and I talked to him about it. He really loved the whole thing and we even got a bit ahead of ourselves – talking about how one day we’ll be big and renowned as the dancers who started the philanthropic culture in Sydney’s dance scene!
• Nancy: This woman is awesome. She’s pretty much my mentor, and I’ve learnt so much from her. When I told her about TDV, she was the one pushing for me to actualise it and even at times when I thought the idea was bad and people weren’t going to help manage it, she said “don’t worry, we’ll make this happen with just the two of us – okay?”.
• Peter: He’s the one who got me back to dancing, and he totally have been supporting me ever-since. He said “when we go big, we’ll be the ones who can say ‘man, I was there when everything first started!’ and you can say ‘I started this!’”.
• As for my boyfriend.. well, yeah . He loves and supports me with everything I do haha. He’s a great guy.

Although you might think I might’ve been the one who started the whole thing, I don’t think I should deserve the credit – I really couldn’t have done it without everyone’s encouragement and support.

So after all the pep talk I got, I finally decided – I’m gonna make this happen, whatever it takes! Even though I’ve never actually been the leader of a whole project before nor have I ever created something so big, I threw all my doubts and anxieties and took that step of faith. Then on, everything changed!

 

The step of faith – a very scary start

I made a Facebook event for TDV (oh, you can actually still check it out here). Everything – from content to the event image. You have NO IDEA how scared I was. As they say:

“The start is what stops most people.” – Don Shula

So yeah, I was heaps anxious and the first 30 minutes after starting it, I was totally just focusing and staring at my notifications, and constantly editing whatever information I thought was dumb or needed more detail. But much to my surprise – everyone was really excited and hyped up about it. You have NO IDEA just how happy I was! Yes, you have no idea of lots of stuff :p. Back then, The Dancevengers was just a random name I thought of to start it off, but people ended up liking it. This led to me deciding to link it to The Avengers as much as possible since it was quite the trend topic. I posted stuff like “pick your hero name!” and even the event image is a silhouette of The Avengers. The event was a chance for exposure and awareness of the project, plus part of recruiting our heroes – the dancers and the team.

 

Affiliation and the Board

After a day or so of the event running, I started approaching other university dance societies. The first ones we managed to gain support from were SoulXpress (SXP, University of Sydney) and Macquarie Dance Academy (MDA). Our principal was: if you want to officially affiliate for this project, have a representative from your society be part of our board team. Fii (Vice President of SXP) and Emmanuel (or just Emman, President of MDA) joined us in our conquest, and they were truly passionate about the whole concept of the project and in addition, they’re great people. We have some members of D2MG who are also part of SXP and D2MG has always been tight with MDA, so it wasn’t difficult to bridge over to them. From there, Ministry of Dance Society (MODSoc, University of New South Wales) got Robin to be part of the TDV board too. He’s an amazing guy who’s always full of ideas and insights, but here’s an interesting story: D2MG and MODSoc weren’t exactly on good terms. However, the new generation of D2MG executives have managed to patch it up by leaving the past behind and starting from scratch to establish a brand new healthy relationship.. I’m very proud of my D2MG kiddos! .

Anyway, so for UTS Hip Hop Society (UTSHH, University of Technology Sydney). I didn’t have the connections lol. BUT, it just happened that I went over to SXP‘s weekly session one day and met a guy from UTSHH, Kai. I think after that I added him on Facebook and he eventually managed to connect us with the President and got UTSHH affiliated with himself being the representative. I swear, he’s a really funny guy!

Let’s cut the story here for today – save it for some other time haha. I kind of need to study for my upcoming exam haha!

You can contact me via e-mail at rusli.christina@gmail.com
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