Web Visibility, Social Media and Online Communications Training

It’s been a very intense week (six months?) for me and I’m just coming down off the back of my third communications training session since Friday. The focus of all my talks has been communicating online and working with content. Or to put it another way, I’ve talked til I’m hoarse about social media, content and engineering presence and web visibility.

It’s been tough, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed discussing things with some very talented scientists, administrators, and students.

No, I haven’t heard of social media

Of the 75 people or so I talked to, just a very small handful are active on Twitter (hello Sibel !). The vast majority had Facebook accounts. No one admitted to being on MySpace, and absolutely no one had heard of Formspring.me. About half were under 30 and the rest were somewhere between 30 and 50.

For all our talk in the marcom sector of social media marketing, content marketing, web visibility and the “new rules” of PR, it’s very clear that these issues are new to so many people – even those that are interested in increasing their web visibility.

Yes, they might understand how it works when you show them slides of how social media and content marketing being used in the B2B and B2C sectors, and follow what you’re saying. It is, however, a different step entirely to expect them to easily pick up what’s happening and implement the strategies and techniques that those of us that work with content marketing often take for granted.

Content Marketing and Web visibility for Beginners

The most frequent question that comes up when you talk about content marketing to an audience of “normal” people – i.e. non-content marketers! – is: “How will I find time to produce all this content? I have a life!”

Of course, if you’re a big organisation or company you may well have the right kind of communications people at hand to handle this for you. Smaller companies, individuals, or organisations like universities and schools, don’t. So they have to either outsource the content creation or do it in house. And that can be difficult if you’re suddenly having to find time in your already busy schedule to bash out a few blog posts, vlogs, and podcasts – each week.

I think the best way to cope with this kind of scenario is to plan your content for a few weeks at a time. Allocate time in your schedule to produce the content and publish to set times and set dates. It’s important not to splurge out four posts on the company blog in an row and then go silent for a month, but spread things out more evenly.

There IS a learning curve to writing blog content, working with audio to create podcasts and editing video. You should find that it gets easier with time, though.

Q: What should I start with to improve web visibility?

I’m a firm believer in your business developing a presence on a variety of online sites like Facebook Pages, Twitter, Flickr, etc. However, I do think if you’re truly going to get started with online content marketing your best bet is to go with a blog.

A blog – on your own domain – can be home to a lot of the content you create: you can post and promote articles, videos, podcasts, white papers, Ebooks all on your blog. You can even get people talking with you and engaging with your content – if you’re lucky!

Once you’ve got a “Hub” set up and started to establish an online presence for your content, then you can put your effort into promoting it across other channels like piping your blog content updates into Twitter or Facebook.

Metrics, Metrics, Metrics

Finally, if you’ve started creating content to improve your web visibility, it’s paramount that you track each initiative. Google Analytics is a great way of finding out how people react to your content and what you need to do to improve it.