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Social Media Tips for the End of the World

May 18, 2011
by Jennifer Grappone

The world is ending this weekend, in case you haven’t heard. Presumably some of us will be still hanging around waiting for some sort of apocalyptic event while others will be plucked away to, I don’t know, eat Hot Pockets and play Angry Birds with the Almighty.

We’d hate for something like the end of the world to inconvenience your social marketing efforts, so here are a few things you can do to make this transition a little easier on your organization.

If you’re planning to be whisked away, good for you! We’ll certainly miss you, especially if you are considerate enough to make things a little easier for your customers in the following ways:

Schedule your farewell messages. There are many tools out there for scheduling tweets. We use free and cheap services like Postling, Sprout Social, and Tweetdeck for this purpose. If you’ve got a lot to say and you feel like splurging (hey, what’s a little money when all forms of commerce are useless anyway?) you can pay for a Pro account on a tool such as SocialOomph that allows you to bulk upload scheduled tweets.

Open up your LinkedIn group. Nothing is more annoying than being blocked out of a sweet LinkedIn discussion because the group administrator has been raptured. Do us left-behinds a favor and take advantage of LinkedIn’s newer group feature: set your group to “open” so anyone can join.

Give the looters a place to check in. Transition your happy customers to end-of-the-world looters* in tech-savvy style. Make sure to claim your Foursquare venue or Facebook Place for your business, so that your check-ins will show up on your official account.

* Important Note: Gravity Search Marketing does not endorse looting, even when the end of the world is nigh.

If, like me, you’re not going anywhere, and you may find yourself a little bored with your newly-deserted Twitter experience. So you’ll want to find some new friends to chat with. Try Listorious to find interesting and influential Twitter users that other people have listed. For the kind of company I’ll be keeping after the end of the world, I’m thinking my best bet would be to find experts in booze or irreverant humor. But you can also find listed social media experts, too.

In case the end of the world isn’t happening this weekend after all, I hope you’ll find these social media tips helpful, anyway.

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Ask the Experts: Will Facebook Links Help my Google…

April 26, 2010
by Gradiva Couzin

Lately my company has been putting a lot of time into our Facebook page and status updates. We want to encourage people to share links to our site in their status posts, but before we make that push, we’re hoping you can settle this question: Will links from status posts and fan pages help our company’s rank in Google?

A: Most Facebook status post links will not directly benefit your site’s search engine ranks.

Here’s why: the majority of Facebook individuals’ status posts are not indexable by search engines, because they’re hidden behind a login. That means, even if a status post contains a link to your website, Google, Bing, and Yahoo! won’t see that link, and won’t be able to apply any “juice” to the page on your site that is linked.

Fortunately, there are some exceptions to this rule. Links from your company’s own page (and your company’s own status posts), from other company pages, and from group or event pages, will typically be indexable by search engine and able to pass link power over to your site. (Don’t hold your breath for these links to bring a big rankings boost – most Facebook pages won’t have much link power to give). And, some Facebook users may choose privacy settings that allow search engine indexing of their status posts, which means those links will also have the ability to pass authority to your site.

Even if Facebook status links don’t directly affect SEO power, there are important direct and indirect benefits. The most obvious direct benefit is the enormous word-of-mouth power that status posts carry. We sometimes measure this benefit for our clients by setting up segments in Google Analytics that look at Facebook-sourced traffic to determine whether this audience is more likely to engage with the site and (in the case of ecommerce sites) make a purchase. There are also possible indirect benefits: As the awareness of your site is increased, it could gain links in search-engine-readable places such as blogs or social bookmarking sites.

By the way, in case you’re wondering, links from Twitter are tagged with “nofollow” attributes so that they, like Facebook status post links, probably don’t directly affect search engine ranks. However, tweets have the advantage of being fully indexed in Google, and tweets get top billing in Google’s real-time search results.

Real-time web indexing isn’t going away anytime soon, and we can only see the importance of online word-of-mouth marketing growing in coming years. Your company’s on the right track! Keep measuring the results with analytics, and keep up the good work!

Social Media Tips for the End of the World

Ask the Experts: Will Facebook Links Help my Google…

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