Posts Tagged ‘social media sharing’

How Far Should You Go To Protect Your Content?

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

There has been a lot of discussion over the last twelve months surrounding the attempt to protect copyrighted material across the Internet. Pinterest, a popular new social media site that is based around users ‘pinning’ pages or images they find useful, has released a meta tag for website owners that will help them protect copyrighted material. The tag itself is easy to apply – <meta name=”pinterest” content=”nopin”> – this will prevent users from ‘pinning’ your content.

Should you prevent users from using services like Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Facebook or any other social media site. In most cases, it may be shooting yourself in the foot. An article on econsultancy.com makes for interesting reading, more so the comments. One comment really sticks out:

“Sorry, thanks for liking our brand and all but please don’t share it with your friends, we’d rather they found it themselves somehow.”

Social media is all about sharing, and except in special cases, you most likely DO want users to share your content, especially if it links back to your website, with their friends. Pinterest is an interesting example since it is currently driving decent traffic to websites. The article does make the point that over time, users may well read your content on Pinterest and not click through to your website. However, if your pages are well branded, then your brand may well stick in their memory for a later date.

It does beg the question, should you be branding your images? If you own the image, then it probably should be branded in some way, even if it’s just your logo in one of the corners. Every time some one uses that image, they’ll also be spreading your brand, and that includes across social media sites. If you do have content that you don’t want shared, then be sure to clearly state that it is copyrighted, and to use a meta tag like that used for Pinterest.

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Posted in Branding | 6 Comments »

Does Your Content Grab People’s Interest?

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012

The Google Panda update has really made people stop and take stock of the content on their website. Content for the sake of content is going out the door. What’s now needed is content that grabs a reader’s attention. The term ‘quality’ content is often bandied about – and it’s not a term I’m overly fond off since one persons view of ‘quality’ is going to be entirely different to someone else’s. Perhaps we need a new word to describe content – how about engaging, since that appears to be the most popular type of content.

Do you write engaging content? The kind of content that readers may share with others? That is becoming the benchmark for content now, not how many links your content acquires. Why is ‘sharing’ an important metric? Sharing implies that your content is worthy of being recommended to others, and since people first starting selling way back in the caveman days, recommendations have been the most sort after marketing prize. Search engines like Google have long understood this principle, using links as the recommendation currency. It has taken them some time to find ways of collecting social data (sharing) and incorporating it into the search algorithms.

Google’s Panda update really tried to remove low quality content from search results replacing it with more up-to-date and more ‘engaging’ content. Article directories and similar content farms all took a big hit in search rankings. Sites that had content that was regularly shared appeared to gain boosts in their search positions.

The lesson for all website owners, particularly those who run a business from their website, is to try and produce content that grabs people’s interest. Instead of volume, it will come down to that all important ‘quality’ component – better yet, engaging effect. From a small business SEO perspective, it will be interesting to see if, in twelve months time, the mantra is not publish more content, but publish content less often ensuring it is topical, what readers are looking for, and yes – engaging. How engaging is your content?

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Posted in SEO for Small Business | 3 Comments »

Social Media Sharing – For Fun Or Profit?

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

There are several ways to measure a successful social media campaign. For some, it’s the number of followers they have and the interaction that occurs between themselves and followers. For others, the main focus is on having content shared as far and wide as possible. There are others who would claim that success can only be measured if both are achieved. Gaining followers is not that difficult, although the quality of follower may not be great. Having content shared is a lot harder and most website owners struggle to achieve more than a handful of shares.

One of the keys to having content shared is the knowledge of what others want to read, and what spurs them to sharing. There are some tactics that will see your content shared more often, although again, the quality of those shares may not be great. Images, particularly funny or silly images, always get passed around. The same can be said for videos; again, those that are funny will often see more shares than bland or dry videos.

As a business owner, care needs to be taken with this type of content. Sure, it will get shared a lot, but will it be associated with your business or brand? That is often the mistake that individuals make. A photo or image gets shared around a lot, but ask someone who shared it where the image came from and they probably won’t know. Concentrating on a lot of shared material is a mistake. What you need to work is on is material that will be shared while also spreading your message  – in other words, content that is shared and easily connected to your business.

That’s all easier said than done. It is possible that there are a lot of brands that have achieved success, often by poking fun at their own brand. While doing so, they are promoting their brand. When looking to increase social media sharing of your content, make sure you are doing so for the right reasons. It is your brand or business that you are trying to promote – not the next door neighbor’s child or cat!

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Posted in Branding | 4 Comments »