Social media is no longer just buzz, it’s becoming a central component of online marketing as a traffic driver, link builder, and even brand management tool.
The term social media includes a breath of sites, including social networks, social news, blogs and lifecasts, microblogging, and multi-media sharing websites. The draw to social media for many marketers, including panelist Vanina Delobelle, Global Product Director for Monster.com, is the user-centric approach that social media provides marketers.
As already mentioned, social media marketing campaigns have the potential to drive traffic, used to monitor how your brand is perceived among consumers, build targeted links to your content, and expand the exposure of your targeted content and improve user interaction with your content or your website.
The flexibility of social media is perhaps what draws companies of all sizes. For car dealers, social media has the ability to address a local demographic, but social media is truly without borders, allowing marketers to communicate with a global audience if required.
Among the most appealing elements of social media is the increasing convergence with search engine optimization. More social media content is finding its way into organic search listings, and if marketers aren’t actively providing social media-ready content, they’ll be missing out while their competitors are dominating in the SERPs.
Thanks social media’s ability to draw-in links and provide regularly updated content, its increasingly being seen within the high-traffic “Golden Triangle” regions of the SERSs. These are prominent areas along the top left of the results where studies have shown that users’ eyes are most likely to concentrate on. Having your dealer website show up organically at the top of the listings within the Golden Triangle, followed by additional content from social media, such as a YouTube video of your latest advertisement, is a powerful way to improve your dealership’s brand, drive traffic, and increase leads.
An example of this in action can be seen when performing a search query for Shreveport Honda Dealers. Those searchers will find not only a Google Maps listing for Honda Longview Texas, followed by the dealership website, but listed within the first page is also a YouTube video of an advertisement for their latest promotion.
Although social media has its skeptics, it currently holds a valuable yet underutilized place within search engine optimization. If dealers are producing videos and other forms of content, they should not let that content go to waste when they could be helping their dealership’s visibility in the SERPs.
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Additional social media optimization tactics to follow soon.
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