Ninja Tips: The Best of Social Media Metrics & SEO from the F5 Expo

The Vancouver community turned out en masse at new ‘changing technologies’ conference player, The F5 Expo, this week. Vancouver is really coming into its own as a hub for fast and furious new media development. That being said, conferences like F5 have a long way to go before becoming truly useful to a wide audience. For newbies, the seminars would have been a chaotic introduction to social media with too much terminology and ‘in-crowd’ jokes. For those of us more up on the lingo and best practices, there wasn’t enough meat for our conference-going buck.

Still, there were some useful takeaways that I’d like to share on two of the seminars throughout the day:

The Metrics of Social Media: Buzz, Bust, or Booming?

• Chip Off The Old Block: Instead of designing one apart from the other, your social media strategy should overlay on top of your existing marketing plan. Just like with any other marketing tool, having goals and a roadmap before you start will determine what to measure, how to tweet and, most importantly, how to measure success.
• What Should I Measure?
  • Quantity (number of followers, number & velocity of click-thru rates) and quality (kind of followers, engagement) are both useful indicators.
  • Sentiment (positive & negative associations) calculated by algorithms are decidedly less useful.
  • Most small businesses plagued by the problem of not enough attention, so until it becomes truly unmanageable, certain measurements are better off being tracked by the human eye.
• And The Experts Weigh In: The two most metric-rich campaigns you can run these days? Google Adsense and Facebook campaigns.
• Some Nifty Tools:
  • Netvibes (at-a-glance custom dashboards)
  • Social Media Firehose (Google-style alerts for social media)
  • Scout Labs (all-around social media tracking, mid-range paid tool)

Search Marketing in 2010

• Top Tips for SEO-friendly Websites:
  • Don’t confuse search engines with poor markup
  • Build content
  • Build links
  • Keep your content (and links) up to date
  • Make sure that your content communicates the goals of your website
  • Inbound links are very important, especially if they’re high quality
    • Guest posting, link affiliation, etc. are good ways to make this happen
    • Authoritative is best (the big names on the web)
    • Get listed in more directories, especially local listings
• SEO or PPC?
  • Long term, SEO is more helpful
  • Short term, PPC is a great add-on and generally leads to extra traffic
  • Users are 25% more likely to click-through if you’re listed as paid and organically ranked, whereas if you’re one OR the other
• What NOT To Do:
  • Using nefarious tactics will cause search engines to flag your site as unsafe
  • Hosting malware, link farms
• Other Bonuses:
  • Tag all your images and videos so they’re being indexed properly
  • Hosting a video on YouTube, Vimeo, as well as your own site may seem like content duplication, but fantastic for SEO
• The Final Word: SEO and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) shouldn’t be an afterthought when building a website. It should be built right in.

Special thanks to Amanda Farough of violetminded Design for contributing her takeaways on the Search Marketing seminar.

Did you attend F5? What did you think of the conference overall? And what were your top 3 takeaways?

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