In my last post I covered that most businesses feel they need to be on Facebook, but are uncertain as to the benefit and the potential returns. There are many case studies of clients making good returns on Facebook, so how do you join them?

In this post I will be looking at what your fans want and how to go about acquiring some of their loyalty. We are not discussing Facebook advertising in the form of paid banner ads on Facebook  – I’ll leave that to another post in this series. For now we are looking at the community whom you can reach out to via messaging and your fan page. This of course presumes that your business has a place on Facebook. The argument for a Facebook presence is not equal for all businesses. Ecommerce stores fair quite well, however you will face some challenges if you are a B2B company such as law firm specialising in contract law.

Almost every client of ours has asked me this question and it is a question that has run through most business owners & marketing execs’ minds. They think they need to be doing it, some are doing it, few people actually know what it is bringing them and no-one seems to be able to tell them for sure.

I recently was copied in on an internal client email that went something along the lines of “oh, by the way, we generated £6k of revenue from direct referrals from Facebook this year to date” to which the MD’s response was simply “Er- Wow!”, his surprise mainly because for them, not an insignificant sum of money from a channel they had thus far ignored. Ignored in the fact that they had done some fundamentals but looked no further at it.

As one debate loses a bit of steam, another raises its head to amuse, confuse and, eventually, prove its worth in the world of online marketing. This time it’s not between SEO experts but rather between companies and those who still swear off social video marketing rather opting to stick with traditional marketing. They need to be educated on how SEO fits into social video marketing and how the two meld to create a dais of pure marketing and advertising genius.

The digital world evolves faster than a mutating virus and companies that want to stay ahead of their competition are forced to conform and keep pace with online marketing and advertising. So many companies need to get past the psychological blockage and belief that social videos are purely for people to upload personal videos to share with the world at large.

According to the laws of gravity, what goes up must come down, and according to research by GobalWebIndex this is also the case with Facebook. So let’s look at the up: The social networking giant has experienced unprecedented growth over the past few years and widespread Facebook usage has revolutionised the way people connect and exchange information. The social networking platform has also successfully accumulated the largest database of personal user information the globe has ever seen, much to the glee of advertisers. It goes without saying that Facebook is one of the most valuable Internet companies in the world. This news may have search marketers scrambling to revise their online strategies or looking around fervently for the next big social media hit. But on second thought, how much should we be concerned?

The SEO community is debating about the popularity stakes of SEO vs social media. Mine’s better than yours. Really? It’s a bit confusing as to what the big deal is because both have their place within online marketing. If used correctly both work in synergy to create a dynamic marketing platform for all businesses.

January is always the dawn of a new year with new possibilities. The Consumer Electronics Show from Las Vegas dazzles us with the latest technology available and on the market and Google potentially completely opens up the privacy of all its users with new policies under a personalised search initiative called SPY World, or more discretely Search Plus Your World. While there are numerous articles online regarding Google possibly becoming the modern equivalent of George Orwell’s 1984 “Big Brother”, I’d like to analyse more the implications of how SPYW affects digital marketing in regards to strategy and reach of efforts already in place by social media and SEO agencies. The premise of SPYW is the melding of the search giant with its fledgling social media platform Google Plus to create an integrated system that provides users with a user centric search algorithm that changes the results heavily dependent on the user.

Time and time again, the online community has watched Google try and fail to break into the world of social media. Buzz turned out to be more of a drone, Wave crashed seriously short of the social shore and Orkut just couldn’t cut it on the international networking stage. Give the folks at Google their due though, they never gave up – and with the advent of Google Plus, it seems they may have finally got it right.

The Google Plus concept has turned out to be wildly popular; in fact, within a mere 2 weeks of its launch, the service reached 10 million users, and a week later, there were 20 million Googlers looking to join the Circles, Hangouts and Huddles of Google Plus.