You've got your social media suite going famously. The full kit and caboodle, with blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious, and probably more besides. they're all up and running and you're feeling quite pleased with yourself and rightly so. Its a big job to set up and keep this going, a reason why so many companies and organisations are getting professional help and advice from Social Media specialists like Ruby's Future. But is all this activity enough?

The answer, in short, is no its not! The point of all of your social media activity is getting your message to where it needs to be. But if it can't be found by prospective clients and service users, than all your hard work is not going to count for much when you need to consider the Return on Investment (ROI) for this type of activity. so what else do you need to do?

Here are some things you need to do to get your content and activity up the search engine rankings, with first page entries the prime objective. The stats show that the first three listings on Google get most of the clicks after all. Getting your content up amongst them is all about making it more attractive to the bots that crawl the web collating content. The process is known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and its a vital component of your social media strategy.

1. Increase your 'Linkability' . You need to get folk adding links to your content from their sites. This has a huge effect on your search engine rankings. If you have web site, try to keep it dynamic rather than static, and add a blog, updated regularly. Give people a reason to link to you. Collect content and provide a weekly digest. Write thought pieces and invite comments. Comment on other blogs and link back to yours.

2. Make your content easy for others to bookmark. Provide 'buttons' for social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Delicious, as well as Facebook and Twitter. provide suggested tags and hashtag your tweets.

3. Push your content out there. Hustle your stuff about by submitting your media to other sites and forums, as well as places like Technorati... This will create links back to you for sure, and people will subscribe to your blog, check your website and follow you on Twitter as a result.

4. Reward all incoming links. List all those blogs which link to you each week. Create permalinks, in the form of a regularly updated blogroll. Use the FollowFriday hashtag (#ff) on Twitter to reward your followers and prospects. All of this is hugely important in pushing you up the search engine rankings.

5. Give your content away willingly and freely. Feed the mashup! your video and audio get used, and credited, and you have effectively been linked to many, many times as each reuse happens. Don't forget to syndicate your content using RSS as well...

All these five activities will see you rise right up the rankings. There will be many more other things you can do, but these are the biggies in social media optimisation and if done well will really allow your content to travel around the web, reaching those places it needs to be.

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Nobody questions the necessity to engage with their potential audience. It's not enough to fire out tweets at regular intervals and then ignore any responses. Nothing will get you unfollowed quicker than ignoring your followers by using one-way tactics. Building up relationships through conversations is so important, as is communicating your message. Video is one way which, if done well, will captivate your audience and get them interacting with all your other social media formats as well. YouTube has positioned itself at the interface between video and social media, with some good tools which allow users to build their own YouTube 'channels' containing their own original work as well as favourite and recommended material, all in a format which can be exported to a blog, as well as being used to drive traffic to your website. Tweeting links to video will engage your followers, and clever social bookmarking (using Delicious, Digg and Reddit) of your stuff all help your site with search engine rankings.

There are five things you need to remember when using video.

1. Keep your video short and sweet. Five minutes is about the optimum length. Any longer and you will turn off your audience and your message will be lost as viewers head for the kettle !

2. Keep your video simple. Nothing turns off the audience than unintelligible gobbledegook, so keep the technical stuff for your specialist on-line library.

3. Keep your video fun. People want to be entertained, and will watch your material, and more importantly, come back to your site if they find it amusing. So if it fits your message, make it funny. You might even find yourself achieving cult status, or even going viral !

4. Keep your video relevant. The whole point of video is to promote your message, so aim for clarity and don't include irrelevant waffle. Promote your message, and avoid using video that has nothing to do with your core interest area.

5. Keep your video original. If its been passed around the interweb then it does nothing for your message unless you are in at the start. Just put out video which is as close to your brand as possible. Using funny stuff just so that you are appearing to use video is a bad move, and folks will probably have seen kit already anyway!


Video can be a meaningful addition to your social media strategy, but if done wrong, is time wasted. It should be a valuable tool for reinforcing your message, building an audience and engaging with them. After all, most people enjoy discussing video and film, so blog your video and start the discussion.
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