Omar Kattan

Archive for the ‘Social Media Optimisation’ Category

Cybersquatting has been a threat to businesses from the inception of the internet. 

The term refers to individuals who buy domain names associated with big brands and sit on them for future profit or gain.

Legislation has since been passed to protect brands against cyber squatting and many companies have successfully managed to claim their URLs back.  However, this phenomena has reincarnated itself in the form of Social Media Cyber Squatting which is more tricky to combat.

If you’ve ever tried to register a YouTube, Facebook or more recently, a Twitter profile, you’ll know what I’m talking about.  It’s nearly impossible these days to register with your brand name as someone else has most likely taken it!

Many brands have been adversely affected by social media Cybersquatting including Exxon who recently discovered that a random person has registered a Twitter account in their name and falsely impersonated them.  Other brands have suffered similar fates.

The solution… make it a priority to register your brand in all major social media sites and use tools such as checkusernames.com to make the process less painful. 

More importantly, invest in an online reputation management service (ORM) to be one step ahead of these pesky cybersquatters as well as others trying to harm your brand.

During the past few years, the internet saw a surge in social media properties including the grand daddy of them all… My Space as well as Facebook (the reigning king), YouTube (social video sharing), Flickr (social photo sharing) Digg and Delicious (social tagging), Yahoo Answers (social knowledge), Wikipedia (social collaboration), Twitter (rising micro blogging star). The list goes on and on and on.

The presence of these social media sites on the internet and the fact that Google et al are being generous to them in the natural search results (SERPS) means that companies can no longer ignore the absolute need to develop an optimisation strategy for these critical social media sites.

There are two main reasons why companies should optimise for social media:

1. Online Reputation Management (ORM)

2. More Brand traffic

Social Media Optimisation for ORM

A no brainer this one.  The fact that search engines are ranking these credible internet properties -in most cases on-page one- means that if you don’t optimise your brand name for them, somebody else with!  In most cases it’s harmless but the recent Exxon case proves otherwise. 

Social Media Optimisation for more Brand Traffic

Its a known fact that search engines only rank one or two listings from the same domain at a time.  If you’ve created subdomains, search engines might and often do rank your subdomain, and in this case you might be able to capture one more listing in the top 10 results. This however is still only 30% of the first page of the natural search results (excluding sponsored results and feeds).  What about the rest of the 70%? 

Well, search engines (led by Google) have recently adopted a Universal / Blended Search algorithm meaning that they now serve images, news snippets, blog posts, Wikipedia profiles and recently, lots of YouTube videos!  If you do not own/control the content on  these social media sites means that you’ve excluded yourself from the possibility of driving more branded traffic to your website.

The above are just two examples of why it is crucial to have a social media optimisation strategy and the longer you wait the more difficult the job becomes of having these sites rank highly for your brand terms. 

In other posts I will explore various techniques used in social media optimisation so stay tuned…

Anyone who’s been on websites such as Twitter will tell you that the information you get on there is hardly information at all. 

Twitter’s basic premise relies on the fact that many people around the world post little soundbytes about what they’re doing and they use devices beyond their computer to do this.  To update their accounts Twitter users can use SMS, PDAs Blackberrys.

Since it is no hidden secret that Google loves Twitter (because of its fresh content) SEO’s have gotten in on the act by also creating profiles and dropping the odd link or two to their client’s websites.

To optimise for twitter follow the steps below…

1. Create an Account

2. Invite your friends

3. Start Twitting (regular posts about your life and activities)

4. Don’t post any links unless they’re really interesting otherwise you’ll lose credibility!

5. If you have a WordPress blog, add the Twitter Plugin that allows your vistors to keep track of your Twits.

Copy Cat sites are trying to capitalise on the twitter craze by specialising in niches such as book and movies reviews.  One such site is Blippr.  I’ve not used it myself but plan to do so soon.