Practical Social Media (Part 2)

When you type in your brand name or product into Google, what comes up? Do you see competitors, an irate customers blog, poor customer reviews on a site, or other damaging results? Have no fear! You can use social media tools to take up organic real-estate on Google' SERP. We will concentrate on doing the bare minimum for YouTube and Facebook in order to achieve quick results and save you time. Since we are ranking for your brand name, the competition should be relatively low and easy to rank for.

Let's do a search for a computer company and see what comes up

Clearly these are not the most favorable reviews. This is reminiscent of the previous blog that discussed brand management! But I digress; lets take the first step in taking up organic space by using YouTube for your videos.

Optimizing YouTube videos for organic rankings

There are many ranking considerations for YouTube. Lets start out with some of the basics.

Name of Video: Title
Description: META Description + keyword relevancy
YouTube tags: META Keywords

These are the area's that you'll want to enter your brand name (since that's what we want to rank for) and other relevant information to the video. For now, let's go with the same "computer" theme and do a search for "gaming computer build" on YouTube and see what the results are

There are other contributing factors that increase video ranking such as views, subscriptions, embeds, age of video, etc which can be seen on my Optimizing for YouTube blog post and Bob Nunns How to get found on YouTube.

Now lets do a quick search on Google and see if the proof is in the pudding (spoiler: it works).

Optimizing Facebook for organic rankings

Create a Facebook page and fill out all the necessary information. Since youre creating it for your brand, keyword sensitive areas will be filled in naturally. What you need to look for is creating a username for your Facebook page. You can do this by going to the following link

http://www.facebook.com/username/

You will need at least 25 fans in order to change your username for your fan page. You will not be able to change, delete, or transfer your username once youve selected it! If your brand name has generic words in it (Brooms Inc, Bread Crumbs, Silvia's Water Dogs, etc) , Facebook might block you from claiming it. If this situation arises, you can contact Facebook at the following link to claim your username.

http://www.facebook.com/legal/copyright.php?noncopyright_notice=1

Keep in mind that both these accounts are not a 1 shot deal. You need to continue to keep your Facebook and YouTube accounts active to gain and maintain rankings for the organic space.