OK, so we all agree that social media traffic converts extremely poorly. However, can it be used help to build authority?

This is the 6th post in the series about Authority Building. The previous 5 are:

1. I Jeff Quipp Am Not an SEO … I’m an Authority Builder
2. What Is Authority, and How Do You Build It?
3. What Type of SEO Client Are You?
4. Authority vs Celebrity … Is There a Difference?
5. Authority Building: Tools of the Trade
6. The Role of Social Media in Building Authority

In this post, I’ll delve into the use of Social Media as a tool in our authority building toolkit.

For all the old school SEO’s

Source: The Geek and Poke cartoon series.

So I was snooping aroiund YouTube to see what information I could find about Windows 7, when I came across this video of Construction Mike managing his day to day with a myriad of various informational and communication devices, all apparently loaded up with Windows 7.

 While I found most of the devices to be soooooo cool and I want them, I have difficulty actually imagining people from most industries, let alone the construction industry, investing in the number of gadgets per employee that Mike had the good fortune to use in his daily routine.

Brand Equity is defined as the value (positive and negative) a brand adds to an organizations products and services.

How do you know that a product has brand equity?

A product with brand equity will:

1) Be able to charge a premium for it’s brand (i.e. the cost of Heinz ketchup versus generic)

2) Evoke long-term loyalty (I’ve eaten KD since I was a kid and it MUST be the real KD)

3) Have a significant market share (notice that McDonald’s has more market share than it’s next 3 competitors combined).

Social media is changing and evolving. In essence, social media sites like the search engines of 8-9 years ago, are growing up. They’re learning from their mistakes, and are constantly improving.

Source: NWCreation.net

Of course, this constant evolution means that users of social media must too change and adapt to the fluid landscape.

For anyone hoping to get their submissions seen by the masses on various social media, this means continuously expanding your network of friends.

3 Reasons to Constantly Build Out Your Base of Friends:
In particular, there are 3 reasons to continuously build out friends in various social media:

Is social media in danger of becoming more about the social than the media?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how social media had an increased propensity towards group think due (unintentionally) to it’s design. This got me thinking, how could the design of social media sites change in order to minimize this risk?

So what if I throw a little love at my friends?

It’s no big deal. Except if everybody is voting for their friends and not for the content then the quality of content will diminish. It’s inevitable. And there is no way to escape it. It’s the false positive effect.

Def’n ‘Addiction Marketing’ - Pronunciation [uh-dik-shuhn mahr-ki-ting]:
A strategy used by companies [read Digg], whereby a product or drug [read front page appearances] with near instant addictive properties is given away free or very inexpensively on the first few ocassions until the victim is addicted. Prices [read level of difficulty] are then raised, demand having been secured.

I’ll give credit for this terminology to Mike Myatt who claims to have coined this term a number of years ago.

Image courtesy: University of Sydney Australia

Credit: Geek and Poke

For the visually impaired: a cartoon with 3 people is shown, depicted two friends wanting to pick up the 3rd friend.

Friends: "Hi, we’re about to drink a beer in a bar. Do you wanna come with us?"

Friend: "I have thousands of unanswered emails, I have not Twittered today, I have to write my more than thousand Facebook friends, I have to join Pownce, I haven’t blogged since… I have no time to drink a beer in a bar. I’m busy enough being social."

Friends walk away.

As first times go, everyone remembers theirs. My first encounter with a social media site was with Flickr. Seeing as this was my first, I’m not sure why I took so long to write about it in this series, other than to say that, from an SEO perspective, Flickr is not as sexy as StumbleUpon, Digg et all.

This week I take a look at Flickr, by the numbers.

The History:

…and now here it is for everyone to see!

Leading digital world measuring company, comScore, Inc. released a report today announcing the major trends in U.S. Internet activity last year.  A great article on CNNMoney.com actually goes into some really good detail on who the top-gaining properties were for the year as well as site categories, and core search market growth.