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Why use social media?

Posted by Redbourn Business Systems on Thursday, September 27, 2012 Under: Social Media & Fundraising

Following on from the NFP Technology 2012 seminar that Steve Cast presented this week on ‘The Fundraising Fantastic Four’, we thought we would re-iterate the benefits of using social media.

One   key reason for using social media is to control as much premium space on Page 1 of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) as possible. 

We found a great analogy, referred to as the ‘Digital Shelf Strategy’ by comScore, that considers the shelves in a supermarket aisle.  Just as ‘consumer packaged goods’ brands position themselves as effectively as possible on these shelves in a supermarket,  online marketers can do the same on SERPs. The top spot on the supermarket shelf is “Eye level grocery” and that position is the same as position page1/position 1 on a SERP. Odds are that you will sell more items from that position than you will from the knee level shelf (page1/position 9).

So by controlling ¾ or more of the available shelf space with your products (or3/4 or more of the  results on SERPs with your links) you will sell more, and conversions will further increase.

Social media is a fantastic way to gather up and occupy more ‘digital shelf space’.  If you search for almost any brand on Google, you will find that the results returned within the top 10 organic links on page 1 of SERPs will be littered with branded social media such as Facebook.com/BRAND and Twitter.com/BRAND. The more ‘digital shelves’ you control with your content, the greater impact you will have. A good example of this is ‘Pepsi’, if you want to see what we mean Google them and check it out!  In the not for profit sector, ‘Dogs Trust’ have also managed their digital shelf strategy to great effect and were one of the best examples we found.

Other social media networks that have started to appear on the first pages of SERPs, including Pinterest and from the growth figures we are seeing for Tumblr, it looks like it will also soon be an important part of the ‘digital shelf strategy’.  Wikipedia is another example, and that’s the topic of our next blog so look out for that update in a week’s time.

So what about Google+? For us the jury is still out on how important it will be, but we advise you to  bear in mind that Google+ makes it possible for Google to understand how individuals share and discuss things. Google can see what you share and who likes it. Based on this information, they can fine tune the results when you or your ‘circle of friends’ use Google search.

One final thought. It is one thing to create  accounts with all these different social media sites to register a presence, but you must remember that in order for them to be a successful ‘Digital Shelf’ in your SERPs you do have to keep  your content active.  There is no point in just having a presence; Google’s ‘spiders’ need to be regularly fed with new content in order for them to see these sites as relevant to the ‘keyword’ searched.  

Share your digital shelf strategy with us.

In : Social Media & Fundraising 


Tags: "social media" "digital shelf strategy" "serps" "not for profit" 
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