Do you plan to promote your B2B company’s holiday party through social media this year? Does your social media marketing strategy aim focus on lead generation? Are you inviting current, future or potential clients to your big bash? Then buckle up team, you have an awesome opportunity to optimize your event marketing strategy with social media!

5 ideas to help with your event planning using social media:

1. Create online invitations (you can also send print ones if you like to keep it traditional) that include links to your social sites. Incorporate a call-to-action above the links that encourages your guests to follow your social networks and join in on the holiday fun leading up to the event.

2. Blog about it on your company page and share through social media. Invite media or industry bloggers to the event to get more press afterwards. Evoke a sense of anticipation and urgency in your expected guests by giving clues to a special guest or party surprise via your blog and social media.

3. Engage your fans leading up to the event through social media. Even if they are not invited or cannot attend the event you can still include them in the festivities. You could create an advent calendar in Wildfire leading up to the big day with industry tips or holiday haikus written by employees. Allow fans an opportunity to be a part of the experience by a polling fans on Facebook for decor theme ideas. Creativity is key!

4. Take photos of party attendees and post an album to Facebook after the event. Set your album tagging preferences to fans only. Announce via your social networks that you have posted the album and let fans tag their pictures. You will encourage attendees to “like” you on Facebook in order to tag photos. It is likely that if they attended your holiday party, they will have no qualms with liking your brand on Facebook and hearing more from your company after the event.

5. Create an event hashtag that is relevant to your brand and live tweet from the holiday party. Play with your target keyphrases when crafting creative messaging. A party is a good time for many to discuss the event via their social networks and share their experiences with their followers. Having a dedicated hashtag can help you capture, organize and follow-up with the conversation during and afterward. You can even include an event tweet digest as part of your party re-cap blog post!

Do you have more ideas for how to promote your holiday party through social media? Share them with GPO through Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Happy Holidays!

We debate about social platforms (and their subsequent CRMs) frequently at GPO. Proper retweet etiquette, tweet automation, and incorporating Klout scores into our engagement strategy have all been items up on our morning coffee chopping block. However, one thing we can agree on is that optimizing content exposure is important and crucial to an effective social media marketing strategy. Timing and social profile choice can play a significant role in how people engage (or don’t engage) with your status updates.

The graphic above (via Breaking Copy) is a sarcastic dramatization, but it brings up an important point: Certain types of content perform better on different channels! Facebook, Google+, YouTube, and Flickr (among other media sharing sites) are great choices for images and video because your target audience will not have to navigate away from the page to view the embedded content. Also, the functionality of these social networks allow you to use your text as a call to action, yet keep focus of your status update on the image or video itself.

Has someone from your company given an important public presentation relevant to your industry recently? Post the slides on SlideShare, and use several tags to describe the content and make it easily searchable for others. Hosting your PowerPoint presentations on SlideShare is not only a good SEO strategy, it is also is a widely-shared opportunity to showcase your brand as a thought leader of your industry.

For questions, ditch the “poll” function on Facebook (for now) and ask questions directly in the status update. Now that Google is indexing comments in Facebook (note: this may change in the future), there is real SEO value in getting your keywords and focused topics to show up in the SERPS. Questions with designated hashtags are very good for Twitter as well. You can facilitate a conversation among followers and harbor it all under a searchable tag, which makes it easy for others to chime in. Finally, another great place to post an industry specific question is in a LinkedIn discussion thread.

In summary, your social media marketing goal should be to publish your content-rich status updates in networks where it is easiest and more inviting to engage. Cross promote on all channels to boost your reach, but always keep in mind the advantages and strengths of each social profile you have created for your brand. They are all different for a reason!

Creating effective Ads on Facebook can be an essential strategy for your social media marketing campaign. You may have used Google AdWords in the past for your online business, and have pulled up the Facebook Ads info-page to find that this type of Ad placement is a whole new ballgame.

One of the biggest differences between Google Adwords and Facebook Ads is that Facebook Ads allow you to tap into the interests and traits of your target market. Facebook has over 730 million users that have created personal profiles with their marital stats, college degrees, gender, age, and interests displayed on their profile. As a marketer, you have the ability to target specific demographics and tailor your message to their likes and interests. Does that sound creepy to you? To some yes, but others figure that if they are going to have to see advertisements anyway, they might as well be relevant to their life in the off-chance that something may beckon their name. Another item to note: You cannot target specific individuals when rolling out your social media marketing campaign; You can only target specific interests.

With that in mind, you may want to do a little research about your demographic before you create your first set of Facebook Ads. There are many free tools that can help

with your search marketing Ad campaign. Alexa.com can help you assess your SEO reach across the global web on a very broad level. QuantCast.com offers a high-level quantitative overview of your demographics of site visitors. Try Yahoo’s Search Clues function to feel pulse of global search trends. You will be able to see what certain demographics are searching the most throughout the web.

Another helpful metric to look at is your “Facebook Insights”. However, if you are a optimizing for a B2B industry or a broad service industry the insights may not tell you much. You can also look at the open profiles of avid fans to get a feel for what they like. You may be surprised to discover trends that can be applied your campaign. Next week, we will stay on the topic of social media marketing with Facebook and go more in depth with how to write effective Ad copy. Stay tuned and see you next week!

Last week, Dan Zarrella broke the Guinness World Record for the “biggest online marketing seminar”, claiming a title that most search engine marketing “gurus” would kill for! Zarrella definitely held down a captive and inquisitive audience (judging by the hyper-active #smsci hashtag) and served up fresh social media marketing stats that dispelled many myths about effective social media strategy.

“The Science of Social Media” is rooted in what Zarrella likes to call The Hierarchy of Contagiousness. Exposure, attention, and motivation make up the three levels that are at the heart of creating content that is highly shareable.

Zarrella’s argument is that you must first set up these strategies for viral marketing success in order for your marketing message or content to be shared on a large scale. It is not enough for you to implement 1-2 of these strategies and achieve a greater chance of longevity. However, Zarrella did not go too far into depth about giving social posts more permanence on the internet and through social media even after showing charts that represented the “fecundity” of social media messages and the life and death of ReTweeted tweets.

At Get Page One, we argue that in addition to Zarrella’s hierarchical strategy, you must also explicitly include influential people that will further champion your social media marketing campaign.

Say that you have written an awesome blog post that is great for your audience. If you are trying to build readership from the ground up, the content of the post is not enough to send viewers flocking to your WordPress site. A call to action and an attention grabbing headline will bolster your content and make it highly sharable or ReTweetable. But, what happens after a few hours or days?

This content gets lost in an RSS feeder, your tweet gets pushed down and becomes out of sight, out of mind. This is where the explicit inclusion of others in your online conversations, the promotion of other content, and being an active member of the industry community becomes mutually valuable. It is a symbiotic relationship that promotes longevity of your message and helps define a clearer voice for your emerging brand.

Form a relationship with influential people in your industry and marketing segment (AKA bloggers and thought leaders). Personalize social media marketing messages with a call-to-action for them to read and share your content when it is applicable to their personal brand, or when it is relevant to topics that they post about frequently. Conversely, promote relevant (but not blatantly competitive) information to your segment. Make no mistake, personal messages and the inclusion of others should be used with discretion and in moderation. It is also a two-way street. You do not want to appear spammy or overbearing to your colleagues or market segment.

The goal of this strategy is to conjur up chances for meaningful conversations that can happen about your brand. Tailoring some of your search marketing vision around influential people can give your promoted content an increased chance of campaign longevity on the internet and across social media channels.

[Image Zarrella, Dan (2011). Annotated by Get Page One, LLC]

Last month, we wrote how the combination of search marketing, social media marketing, analytics and consumer experiences can combine to tell a more complete story about how a brand uses the Internet to market products and services. Creating a unique online experience helps answer questions of why the consumer should pay attention to your business and why they should keep coming back to your website or social network. Businesses must also answer the fundamental question of how to build a long-term strategy around these platforms and who will implement and monitor them.

It’s easy to think that experiential marketing is simple. Use a recipe of creating interactive platforms for conversation via social media marketing, provide entertainment, develop funny advertisements and bingo, you will have customers practically knocking down your door. Yet, for many brands, experiential marketing is actually a difficult concept to grasp. In most companies, core competencies center on the manufacture and selling of products and services rather than marketing.

Just as major organizations use an outside advertising agency to create and develop commercials and marketing campaigns such as the E*Trade baby, the development of experiential marketing campaigns often requires experts who can help uncover the key traits of how a brand resonates with consumers. Television and radio advertisements are unidirectional methods of communication with an emphasis on branding.

Search and social media campaigns work similarly to branding; however, these mediums are more adept at translating resonance and connection with the consumer into meaningful methods of educating, entertaining and engaging an audience. Yet, taking the brand experience to the digital realm requires an expertise in facilitating and motivating two-way communications. It’s not always as simple as having an executive assistant manage a Google Adwords or YouTube video campaign.

At Get Page One, we create search and social media marketing plans with your customer in mind. Our core competencies and expertise focus on helping create the brand experience while you concentrate on developing outstanding products and services.

Many C-Suite executives and marketing managers know both search marketing and social media are important. For some organizations, much of a customer’s initial awareness about products and services is likely to derive from search engines, social media or both. Yet, in terms of their affect on the bottom line, the thought of allocating substantial dollars to these channels may sometimes be a tough decision. The challenge reflects bottom-line thinking; getting the mind around where search and social plug-in to a business can be puzzling. Although, when we uncover the various benefits and connect search and social with business objectives, we begin to see a clearer picture of the overall importance of social and search.

Location, location, location. This cliché is true for real estate and for brick and mortar operations. It is also true for the Internet. If we use our Yellow Pages today, it’s often as a fire starter; otherwise, it just sits collecting dust in a drawer. Today, the search engine has effectively replaced the Yellow Pages for online users. To be found, location in the search rankings is becoming almost as important as physical location and in some cases, more important. Restaurants, for example, are discovering that Internet traffic can very well lead to foot traffic.

Numerous organizations get new business via referral from existing customers. Interestingly, many referrals now are made via social media rather than around the water cooler. Additionally, customer retention has become a significant focus with social media marketing, by augmenting and adding customer touchpoints that are more relevant and more frequent than the once-a-year sales call or monthly newsletter. This “top-of-mind” strategy using social media not only builds product or service awareness, but also creates a more consistent brand message through customer engagement.

Conversations are happening about brands all over the Internet, and reputation management can affect the bottom line for a business in both positive and negative ways. Consumers seeking information via the Internet often get their first impressions of that brand by what they discover via search or social media. Thus, it’s vitally important for a company to participate in online conversations and boost the positive while mitigating the negative.

When businesses consider search and social as important aspects of their marketing that directly touch the consumer, the benefits and justification for adding search and social to the marketing budget are much more clear. In essence, connecting search and social with everyday operations can provide significant value to a company’s bottom line.

We offer full social media marketing services as an extension of our SEO work for clients here at Get Page One. But a lot of our SEO customers like to manage their Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yelp and LinkedIn accounts in-house. They’re doing a great job, and we’re always here to help when questions come up about best practices and whatnot.

It’s common for internal marketing departments to struggle with the prospect of making connections for increased engagement on social networks. Many marketers feel pressured to pump out their own authentic, quality content with limited time and/or resources available. We’d like to share some insight we picked up from a recent post on MediaPost’s Search Insider blog, titled “Why Not Be The CMO Of Everyone?” by Derek Gordon.

It pays to get creative when it comes to generating great social content and boosting those fan and follower counts. Gordon suggested thinking beyond the marketing department when it comes to producing, networking and influencing socially. What is your company’s best asset? The people. And there’s a solid chance that a lot of those people, no matter what department they work in, are using social media personally. Most of your employees are on Facebook and probably LinkedIn, too. Some of them are probably regular tweeters and bloggers. When you begin to think of every person in your organization as a member of the marketing department, you might be surprised at what you find.

Take an audit and determine which of your coworkers are the most socially active and influential online. These individuals are an extension of your brand, even if most of their blogging and tweeting is off-topic (although you’ll often find employees sharing news and insight about your industry or company). Think about how to “activate, focus and curate” content from this arsenal of potential social media marketers. Harness their content-producing savvy and influence by drafting an unofficial panel of experts.

“Very often, employees in large enterprises are actively evangelizing their brands or products and no one in the home office even realizes it,” Gordon wrote. Even if this isn’t the case at your small business, make it happen by inviting active employees to contribute to your social marketing team. Encourage anything and everything from this panel— tweets, blog posts, strategies and ideas for boosting engagement. Ask them to spread the word about your company’s accounts, and you’ll begin to absorb their personal networks of industry peers and friends.

Growing audiences will appreciate your brand’s personable voice and insightful content. Social media is a unique, constantly evolving channel. We’ve found that being overly cautious or traditional in your strategy just won’t work. Get creative and make this essential component of modern branding work for your business. As always, contact us if you have any questions.

If you’re not using social media to promote your business, you’re missing out.

A recent study by Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group, called the ENGAGEMENTdb study, ranks the “world’s most valuable brands based on how they leverage social media to interact with customers.” Able to measure and monitor brand engagement, ENGAGEMENTdb is the first of its kind. Essentially, Wetpaint and Altimeter Group are measuring social media’s financial value. For example, how does a Twitter account actually pay off — or does it even pay off at all?

So the study took the world’s 100 most valuable brands (as measured by BusinessWeek/Interbrand “Best Global Brands 2008″ rankings) and looked at their social media use — how well the brands are engaging their consumers and how that affects their revenue and profit. What the study found was that those 100 brands are “experiencing a direct correlation between top financial performance and deep social media engagement.”

What exactly does that mean? Simply put, companies engaging in social media are more financially successful.

At Get Page One, we’re firm believers in the power of social media marketing. But you can’t just sign up for accounts on Twitter, Facebook, etc. and hope for it to pay off. You have to work hard at it and be consistent in the way you use it — you can’t just sign up and leave. Successful social media marketing involves signing up for social media accounts and actually being social — interacting with other users, regularly updating and participating.

Engage in social media, be consistent and see it literally pay off.

April Fool’s Days of the past were all about classic pranks, like gluing a quarter to the ground on a busy street corner.

But April Fool’s Day seems to have become less about physical gags and more about Internet gags. It can be  pretty easy to pull off a prank online — especially since so many of us spend about every waking moment in front of a computer. Plus, pulling a prank online means you could get a ton of people at once to fall for your trick. For example, tweeting something like, “CRAZY video of me meeting Kanye West last night!” with a link to this video. Hilarious, I know. Feel free to use that one next year.

So what about company websites that take today to let loose and show everybody their wacky, fun side? Maybe you read about Google’s CADIE today, or maybe you excitedly clicked on the ad for the $99 pink leather Eames lounger in today’s Apartment Therapy email.

There’s also the extremely well-done (and daring!) Whole Foods homepage, which features a prominent ad for Organic Air that costs $6.99 for .02 oz (get it?), along with a bunch of recipes for dishes like Deep-Fried Pork Eclairs, Arugula Compost Surprise and… Toast. Mmmm.

The question is, if you’ve seen something April Foolsy today on a business’ website, how’d you find it? I’m willing to bet one or more of these things happened:

• You saw the link on your Twitter feed
• You saw the link on your Facebook feed
• Someone IMed/G-chatted it to you
• You saw the link on one of your favorite blogs (this one, obviously)
• A co-worker mentioned it during a lighthearted conversation at the watercooler

Next question: Did you tell someone about what you saw? Of course you did. That’s exactly what they wanted you to do. The April Fool’s Day joke was all about social media marketing, and by it getting passed from person to person via Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc., it was successful.

What’s more is that successful viral marketing like this means lots of inbound links to your website. That’s excellent for search engine optimization.

Maybe we won’t see as many classic pranks on future April Fool’s Days, but let me drop a pretty intense analogy on you here: By pulling off a well-done joke on a company website like Google.com or WholeFoodsMarket.com, isn’t that just the modern-day version of gluing a quarter to the ground on a busy street corner? People who first notice that quarter will pause to look closer, some bending down to try to grab it, which causes passersby to look and see what all the fuss is about. No matter what, everyone walks away knowing that there is a quarter glued to the ground.

(Whoa.)

By now, you’ve likely heard at least something about Twitter, the social networking website where users can “tweet” 140 characters at a time. People use Twitter for all kinds of stuff — keeping in touch with friends, finding out what’s going on at a particular place, joining conversations and, most important to this blog post, marketing.

How does a website where people seem to just be writing about everyday personal things — “What a beautiful day!” “Just saw a superlative movie!” “I’m eating food at a restaurant!” — have the potential to be a marketing platform? you may wonder.

Look closely at Twitter. Spend some time looking around at what people are saying, or, even better, type in a keyword at search.twitter.com. When you do that, you’ll start to notice something: Twitter has a ton of potential when it comes to marketing your business.

And businesses are no stranger to using Twitter as a marketing platform. Just look at Skittles — for one day a couple of weeks ago, going to Skittles.com brought up a search for “#skittles” on search.twitter.com, so any time a Twitter user mentioned Skittles, it’d show up in the search feed. Needless to say, a few jokers took the opportunity to write inappropriate remarks about the brand, but for the most part the chatter was positive. Skittles got exactly what they wanted: for people to talk about Skittles! And, hey, that’s exactly what we’re doing right now, so it clearly worked.

Countless other companies are already on Twitter, as they’ve quickly realized its social media marketing potential. Companies like Whole Foods, General Motors, Comcast and JetBlue use Twitter to actually interact with their customers, and they even provide customer service through it. That’s a brilliant way to use Twitter, since it seems customers truly appreciate when a human from a business actually takes the time to speak to them. A personal reply online seems so little and basic, but imagine how well this kind of customer service resonates with people.

It’s incredibly easy to make Twitter one-way and just send out self-promotional tweets, a mistake that countless businesses are making right now. Doing it that way is not only lazy, it’s a missed opportunity. Making it two-way (where you are actively replying to other users and engaging in conversation) is exactly how Twitter is meant to be used. Interaction is essential if you’re going to effectively use Twitter as a marketing platform.