Why Your Business Should Be On Social Media - Internet Marketing Podcast Number 201

Welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burst, owner of eWebStyle. Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Welcome to another fun-filled edition of the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I tried to say it faster because I already said it and there's no reason to keep saying it over and over again. You have tuned in to the most popular SEO and internet marketing podcast on iTunes. Thank you all for making that happen. We have, like I said, another fun-filled edition. As always, there is a tip from our previous podcast, and that tip is you must get familiar with GWT to properly manage your site. By the way, GWT stands for Google Webmaster Tools, and you must get familiar with it. If you are managing a site or optimizing a site or the person in charge of that website, get familiar with GWT. There's lots of cool things in there. They're constantly improving it. More importantly, any time there's something wrong with your site, like malware or bad links or anything like that, that's where you find that information out at. So get familiar with GWT if you're managing a site. Remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers. Yes. Where our mantra is. Don't be a douche. If you can, tweet now, hashtag now, and use a star. Don't use a star. No, don't use a star. It's easy. Hashtag, SEO Podcast. This is number 201. Be sure to tag us in it at eWebStyle, which we'll probably need to put up there next time. Yep. And tag us in it. That way we can link up with you and do all of our social stuff. Remember, if you're listening to this podcast and you want to do us a small favor because you appreciate the new mics and the fact we've improved our audio, I'm thinking 200%, maybe 300%. What you could do is you could go, there's two things that you can do for us. One of them is three steps, and those steps

are go onto iTunes, create an iTunes account, write a review. That's one of the things you can do. If you do write a review, especially if you're in some other country, make sure you send us an email, podcast at e-webstyle.com. And the reason you need to send us an email is because in order for me to see your review, if you wrote a review in iTunes under a different country, I actually have to set my iTunes to that country. The other thing that you can do for us is go to our G Plus account and write a review there. That's Google Plus for those who wonder. It's actually G Plus Local, right? Yeah. And what you can do is go to e-webstyle.com slash G Plus, or you can go to e-webstyle.com slash Google Plus. Either way, with the G or with the Google, with the plus sign or with plus spelled out, we'll take you directly to our Google Local page. Leave us a review. We do have a referral program. While you're there, leave us a review, put us in your circle, and plus one us. Thank you very much. And then email us. And then like us on Facebook and Twitter. By the way, if you do want to like us on Facebook, all you need to do is go to facebook.com slash e-webstyle. Or you can find us at twitter.com slash e-webstyle. There are videos located at youtube.com slash e-webstyle. And you can fire off an email to us, podcast at e-webstyle.com. We do have a referral program. The way it works, you give us customer who becomes SEO. I like that. That sounded caveman-ish. You give me customer. I beat SEO into head. As long as customer is paying client. As long as customer is paying client, you continue to get paid. Are there any other kind of caveman? I don't know. All right. Let's see. We have a little bit. You know what? Let's do this right now because we get to enjoy the segment, which is called the algorithm

cataclysm. You got to check out that special effect. I thought I was going to fall off the screen. No special effects ever. So you want to get into your news first about the cataclysm? No. Go ahead. So Google reached another algorithm. They did not give it a title. But what Matt Cutts did indicate, he called it a multi-week release. So it's an algorithm that's going over, doing several updates every day over the course of several weeks. Now, what's interesting is what that algorithm change is targeting. It's targeting links in different sites like guest blogs and PR sites. And we'll get into that in a minute when I address Rachel's question. All right. So I have a little bit of news. And before the news, we've got a couple reviews that I found. This one I like. It's five star. It is on iTunes. It's by Axios. It says, and this is actually from Germany. Axios. Back in 2010. This is why I say, if you write a review and you're in some, any other country other than the U.S., please go ahead and send us an email, podcast at e-wolfstyle.com. Let us know so that we find it sooner than three years later. This one says, I really enjoy listening to the podcast. It is a good source and inspiration for my slash our work. I can recommend it to everyone who started with SEO. Marcus from Nuremberg, Germany. And he says, absolute inflation, which says highly recommended. Yeah. Thank you. What did he say? Punch in the face. Punch in the face to you. However you say that in German. Yeah. And mean it. But to for Kai. Maybe. There you go. I knew in Spanish you just needed to add an A to everything. I didn't know you needed to add a Kai to anything. I didn't know that to just now, though. It works. Kai. All right. So this one is from, actually from Portugal, from Lisbon, Portugal. Must hear for everyone interested in SEO. That is the title. It is five

stars. And it says, very rich tool for everyone interested in learning more on search. These guys are very knowledgeable about the topic. And I've learned so much while I was hearing them on my way to work or while I was doing the dishes at home. He used the at symbol because apparently his home has a Twitter account with my headphones on. Maybe the, I don't know why we needed all that information. At home dishes with headphones on. Maybe the introduction is too long. Is that his introduction or mine? Yeah. We'll know in a second. Maybe it's the at symbol with the headphones. Before they got to the meat. But I absolutely recommend these guys. All right. So punch in the face to Mr. Hugo from Lisbon, Portugal. Look, Hugo, you're not alone. I, too, watch dishes with my headphones on. So I totally get it. Oh, it's a thing. It's a thing. It's a thing that people do. Yeah. All right. So finally, we've got from G Plus, Craig Williams. G Plus review? Yeah. I need to figure out something new for those. Thank you, Craig Williams. Five stars. Five stars. Five stars. Really enjoy the podcast, guys. Every episode has been informative and helpful, especially number 192, as he is a prime, as I primarily use WordPress 2. Okay. Also, 2, not 2, 2. Unless you've covered it in some much earlier podcast, new listener, I'd really enjoy hearing about what are some other plugins you found useful and why keep up the good work. Patiff first to Craig Williams. Another Patiff to you, Craig, because I was wondering the other day which podcast it was that we covered WordPress plugin, 192. Thank you for saving me a lot of research. Craig, we do have a plugin. If you're interested, we are looking for some testers of this plugin. Basically, what it will do, we'll change the phone numbers on a website based on where the traffic arrived from. So if somebody arrived at your website by clicking a Google pay-per-click. Facebook ad or

TPC ad or even an organic ad. It will show them a different phone number for the duration of their stay. And if you use that by having those phone numbers, of course, forwarded to your main office, you can track those calls and understand exactly what's bringing you the most value. Is it your pay-per-click? Is it your Facebook? Is it your organic search? Yeah. It works well for a business that uses phone calls as a primary form of, you know, customer acquisition. We need to talk. Then this is a great way to track those phone calls and see what's really working or not. Absolutely. All right. A little bit of news. Samsung. Oh, excuse me. Let's get to today's date. A little bit of news. Google now has a Find My Phone app. Yeah. Thank you, Google. That was nice. I think it's a great announcement. Yahoo buys Rockmelt. So for those of us, of you who are like us and don't know what Rockmelt is, apparently it's a browser that's intently focused socially. So it uses, types into the Facebook APIs and uses your account. So maybe on the left, it's showing you all the people who are chatting at the time. On the right, it's showing you, you know, the latest feed from your good friends or whatever. And then you can be surfing there in the middle. So it's a cool concept. I mean, it's so social. Great concept. But my thing is with Yahoo, though. What are they going to do with it? Exactly. I don't understand how spending the money you spent on Rockmelt helps anything. Well, if history tells us anything, then Rockmelt will just close in a couple of years. Yeah. Just don't. The football season is almost here, Yahoo. So I'll be logging back on, you know, for fantasy football. Don't cancel his account. Yeah, don't. Because the guy next to him said that Rockmelt's going to close in a couple of years. That is true, though. Yeah. And this was good. I thought that was interesting. Call

of Duty is going to China. And then somebody asked the question, well, who's the bad guy in Call of Duty if you're in China? Because right now the bad guy is Russia, right? And so it doesn't, you know, they're kind of allies a lot. So it's not their mortal enemy or a sea anemone either. Either one of those. So that is the meat of the podcast. It is now time to get, excuse me, that is the potatoes of the podcast. It's time to get into the meat. Take it away, Chuck. All right. Well, before we jump into our meat, let me hit you with another side dish. Got a couple of punches in the face to some people on Twitter. So punch in the face to Snap Digital. They create digital marketing campaigns. They've been following us and the new Best SEO Podcast. So punch in the face to you guys. And another one to George. This is at George Kanakis. He's an internet entrepreneur. I like it. Yeah. I'm not sure what that means. That's an E-I. I-E? Internet. I-E. Yeah. He's an I-E. He's an I-E. Isn't that a browser? Yeah. So punch in the face to you. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for, you know, rocking with us. A couple of questions from Twitter as well. One from my boy, Bill Hamburg, at PA House Link. He asks, so with a massive round of logging attempts coming from out-of-country IPs, is it worth restricting via the HT access? My assumption is that you're using WordPress, Bill. And so we use a plug-in. Plug-in is called a limit log-in. We apply that plug-in, and that allows, that pretty much prevents people from logging on. And more importantly, it sends us an email telling us how many times they tried, and then we can set a limit. Give them two times, give them four times, or whatever it is. We usually set it at two. Some of our slower clients, it's like ten times. Yeah, exactly. Because it's not a spammer. It's just our

client tripping. But, yeah, we use the limit log-in plug-in, and so far, we've been using it and haven't had any problems with it. It works great. So that will be my recommendation. Actually, the only problem we've had is that some of our clients get frustrated that they keep receiving these notes that somebody just tried to access their WordPress site. Yeah, they don't understand that that's a good thing, that they got the email. They were denied. So we also got a couple questions from Facebook. Punch in the face to Rachel Parker, resonant content. So she asks, Google's warning against large-scale guest posting and optimized anchor text in the press release. So this was part of our algo cataclysm, right? Wait, wait, wait. That was part of our algorithm cataclysm. And so basically what they've done was, you know, content scraping and article spinning has always been a big issue. And so what's going on now, the trend these days is guest blogging, which is cool to a certain extent. The problem is when you have, let's say, a certain author, and he's posting an article, he submitted an article to you to post, he submitted that same article to several other people to post, and they end up posting it. And now he has this exact match anchor text all throughout his article that links back to his site. Google is saying, wait a minute, that's kind of suspect. We're not going to value that. Not only are we not going to value it, you should nofollow those links that are in that text, because if you don't, then we're just going to manually spam them. So that's not only for guest blogs, but they're doing that for PR sites as well. It used to be a really big deal where you would write a press release and you would include, you know, some exact match anchor text to whatever your prime keyword is linking to your site. And then you submit that article to all these PR sites like Newswire or whatnot. And then now

you have this article with all of these exact match links all linking to your site that have been submitted everywhere. Worked a couple of years ago, not working now. Google is saying those links should be nofollowed. And if there aren't nofollowed, then we're going to make sure nobody else follows them. So if you're doing that and that's part of your practice, you might want to stop, find you a new route. If you're guest blogging, I don't recommend not guest blogging. I recommend only soliciting articles from decent authors. The personal problem I have with it is, you know, we all get these emails. Hey, I just wrote several articles that you can use for your site. And it's offensive, to be honest. Like, I like what Mike King from iAcquire said. He was like, you know, check my content. My content is unique. It's authentic. It's original. Why would I want to post your generic, you know, content? Written for the masses. Written for them on my site. Yeah. And so not only don't send me this no more, but I'll probably spam you as well. So, yeah. If you guest blogging, take the time to write authentic content. Or if you're using content writers, you're going to have to spend some money. But get some good content, because that's the issue, the bad content out there. So, that's that, Rachel. I hope that helps. The last question from Facebook was from Rafi. Jim got you in. I like it. Yeah. I'm running with it. Jim got you in. He says, is it useful to have tweets go to Google Plus? And if so, is there a way to make that automatic? Yes, no, yes. All right. I'll give you three answers. The one is, well, no, yes, no. So, the answer is no, there isn't a way to have tweets go automatically to Google Plus. No. You can't do that yet. I wish you could, but you can't. Google has. They did reformat some stuff. Right. If you log into Google Plus now, they give

you all kind of API information, but unfortunately, it doesn't work with Twitter. So, you can't do that. Not yet. Yeah. And so, the answer is, is there a way to make it automatically? No, because you can't do it. I will say, it is effective to put your tweets on Google Plus. So, whatever you're tweeting, take the time to copy that and paste it in G Plus. But I will say this, add to it. Google doesn't have a 140 character limit. Users on Google Plus are a lot more experienced and, you know, they're not looking for something real quick that looks like a tweet. So, if you're going to copy that from Twitter and paste it to Google Plus, add all that other information that you couldn't put on Twitter because of your character limit. Like, I don't know, a link to the site, maybe a longer description about what you're talking about, things like that. An image right there embedded in the post. Exactly. Because it's Google Plus and you can do that. So, yeah, if you're going to share that on Twitter, definitely share it on G Plus as well. But since you have the extra character space and the extra features, take advantage of it. Yep. And that's it for this. So, now for the meat. Now for the meat. Kelsey Jones posted an article on Marketing Land. Five reasons why your business shouldn't be on social media. Eh! Oh, sorry. I was just warming up. You were warming up? Yeah, and yeah, as soon as I saw the title, I made that same sound. I go, eh! Yeah, I was like, because every, to me and to us here at eWebStyle, we feel every business should be on social media. If you're not watching, I am now putting my hands up in the cross formation that you would see on Family Feud when somebody gives a bad answer. Eh! There we go. And so, we just feel like every business should be on social. What kind of social and how you use

it could be differently, but we feel that every business, regardless of what you're in, should be doing something social. Yep. So, her number one reason why a business shouldn't be on social media is because you don't update. Eh. Do you bother any batteries? No. It's a valid concept. Yeah. I totally get the concept. You don't update, therefore you shouldn't be there. That's what I disagree with. Yeah. I feel like you should just start updating. I believe if you... I think too, right? You should be there. You should be there. Even if you're not going to update, and you should update. You should be updated, definitely. Like, if you're on Twitter, schedule some time. You know, I encourage people to, you know, social media is that important where you need to block aside some time to be social. Yep. You know, so set up a Twitter campaign and tweet. Make sure the app is on your phone and get used to it and know how to use it because everybody has, you know, five minutes waiting for the car to get ready, waiting at the doctor. Pumping gas. Pumping gas. Eating lunch. Waiting on your drink to come. Yeah. Like, there's all kinds of opportunities to tweet and to be social. By the way, don't tweet waiting for the gas to finish, waiting for my drink. Waiting in the doctor's office. Come up with something else that you want, you know, that happened in the day. Something about your business. Yeah. Right? Let's say you're a plumber. I think that's one of the examples she used later. If you're a plumber and you're waiting, this is a good time to tweet about, you know, maybe winter time's coming. Don't forget to wrap your pipes, blah, blah, blah. We have a problem with frozen pipes here in Houston. And so, during the winter time. Once every five years. Yeah. But that's a time when you would want to tweet something like that. So, number two, she goes on to say, you aren't in the right industry. Thank

you. Like I was saying earlier, I believe that every business should be doing something social. There's a social media platform for every business. Exactly. Again, if you're in a plumbing business, you know, that's the right industry to be tweeting specific tips about maintaining pipes or keeping drains cleaned. If you have a plumbing business and you have a storefront, then it's worth you being on Foursquare and letting people check in. It's worth you Instagramming pictures of your products and things like that. And so, I won't say that there isn't a right industry for social media. I'll say that depending on the industry you're in is going to determine how you use it. But every industry should be there. Number three, you don't know what you're doing. That's most people. Give me a new device and I won't know what I'm doing until I figure it out. And that's okay. I think the key here is learn, right? Learn how to do it. If you're a business, an example Chris gave was great. You shouldn't be tweeting, you know, waiting on my gas to pump or waiting on this drink. That's from people who don't know what they're doing. Take that time to tweet something either about your industry or about your business. Technically, the number is your tweets and posts should be roughly 60% to 70% industry related and 30% to 40% business related. So, a business related tweet may be maybe one of your employees did a great job cleaning somebody's pipes. That's a great tweet. Or maybe it's one of your employees' birthdays and you guys are having a celebration and all clients are invited. Great tweet. Business related tweets. Maybe you guys have an event coming up. Another business related tweet. Or maybe it's all homes in a certain area are suffering from flood water damage or whatnot. That's a great industry tweet, right? And so, definitely take advantage of that. 60% to 70% industry, 30% to 40% business. I will say it is really, it would be really hard to tweet and

be social so poorly that you're actually doing more damage than good. Exactly. And a great example, Nick, just brought to our attention. Politics, religion. Yeah. And there was a third. Spirituality or something like that. Those are things that could damage your, you know, especially if you have strong views, especially if they're on the farther ends of the spectrum and the way you present them is not gracious. Well, especially if you have strong views about a current event or something that's pretty big. Like, for example, you know, maybe you aren't a Democrat, right? Right. And maybe you didn't want Barack Obama to win or whatever. And most of your clients do. You know, then Facebook is not the place to go on and vent about how you're disappointed with everything else. Boo Barack Obama would not be a good tweet for you. Not for somebody who's me, who's a Barack Obama fan who wants to spend, who wants to spend money with you. Yeah. Save that for another platform, something personal, not related to your company. A soapbox somewhere. Yeah, definitely. Preferably in a closet. And I don't care which. With the lights off. I don't care what your opinion, either way, boo or yay, Barack Obama, you know. Yeah, that's irrelevant. From a business perspective, keep it in. Keep it in. Keep it in the proverbial business closet. How about that? With the lights off. Let's see. I don't fall. And if you do, don't sue us. You killed the soapbox. Let's see here. Number four, you don't respond. And. Yeah. Yeah. This is key. You have to respond. Well, actually, so that's. Yeah. Yeah. You have to respond. Right. Regardless, negative or positive. If people tweet you something negative. Well, I won't say you have to respond. It depends on what it is. If it's a legit concern and it happens to be negative. Respond. Respond accordingly. Well, remember, this is a. This is reasons you shouldn't do social. And she's saying. Yeah. One of the reasons you don't respond is a reason you

shouldn't do social. We. I still. Again, back to the. You really have to work hard to be so bad that you're doing more damage than good. Definitely. And I mean, you should respond. Maybe she could talk about timeliness or whatever. And again, our argument is be there and respond. And respond. Because with worst case scenario, what you don't want to happen is you tweet something or Facebook something. And and it actually generates some interest. And people have questions about said product or said service. And you're not responding. Then that that's the problem. So so you have to respond. Number five, you don't make it worth your while. And I like this. Social media is is one of those things that. Sorry. No problem. We had a technical technical difficulty there. Social media is one of those things that that that when done right, when used effectively, can have a huge impact on on customer service, on SEO rankings and things like that. So so definitely make it worth your while. Why? Well, most platforms are free, first off. So there there's no out of pocket expense, if you will, other than time, of course. Secondly, everybody's on it. And there is a platform for you, regardless of what your business is. We feel all businesses should be on LinkedIn. If you are a brick and mortar, you should be on Foursquare. If you have products, you should be pinning them and Instagram. Yeah. I mean, things like that. These are just kind of absolutes. We feel like that should be happening. And so take advantage of it. Make it worth your while. And I'm going to just going to let you know when you're looking, if you don't have a LinkedIn account or you don't have a Facebook account or whatever, and you're looking at the daunting task of creating that. Trust me, it's going to take a little bit of time in the beginning. And if you create some very simple habits, like I said, using your phone, when you take a break at

the office, I don't know, there's a, there's usually a bathroom break that you could do a tweet from if you take your phone with you. That would, in Frank, it has actually probably decent timing for once or twice a day. Yeah, exactly. It may seem insurmountable in the beginning. It will take some time and then it, the time necessary to expend on your social campaign is going to, is going to dwindle. Look at it like this. Let's say, let's say you are a plumbing business and there's another plumbing business and you're not tweeting, you're not blogging, you're not being social, but this other business is. If I'm looking for a plumber in my area and I'm searching and I come across these two businesses and one is posting tips about how to maintain certain pipes or how to install certain faucets or writing blog posts about how to deal with, you know, floods that, from backflows and things like that, one, Google is going to consider them the expert and the authority on that subject and two, as a user, I'm more likely to use them because they are giving me information. So, so take advantage of the social and, and do it. So, that's it there. No more, I was just, I was just getting warmed up. Yeah, I was just getting warmed up. Oh, you can do it again if you want to. Hey, we did get a note from one of our listeners, actually viewers, who made the point that you may not be able to get your tweets to show up on G+, but you can get your G+, posts to show up on Twitter. So, I just sent a note asking, we'll, we'll see if we can get this up on our Facebook page so that there's some way to do that and, and we'll kind of explain. I did ask, hey, how do you do that? Is it a tool? Is it built into G+. Very interesting. Yeah, so it kind of, could, could potentially change if you want,

if you really want to focus on G+, uh, and Twitter at the same time, then maybe you set this up and just, can just post on G+, and have that go over to your Twitter account. Which would then automatically go to Facebook. Yeah, look how, look how fancy schmancy, hey, don't give away all our secrets. All right, so we got a blank stare. Oh, we got a blank stare, okay. I almost think it should be called what stare. What stare? Like, what? And say, because blank. As long as you say that before we stare, then we can do it. Because that's what I'm saying in my head, like, what? Okay. Here we go. What? All right. Okay, so, this, this one goes to, um, this one goes to TGI Fridays. All right, yeah. So, so they were an investigation. It's a national chain. I think it's everywhere in the U.S. If it's not, it's kind of like a Chili's or whatever, uh, in, in, in most areas, yeah. Tight on them. So, what they did, they just got fined $500,000 for, get this, cheating clients, cheating their customers, specifically in the alcohol arena. Do you come in, you order a Ciroc or a Great Goose Cranberry, and they give you McCormick. Ooh. Yeah, it's really bad. They took it a step further. Somebody came in and ordered a scotch. They got, and I'll post the link to show where I got this information from. They served them rubbing alcohol in caramel. And that's documented. So, and the scotch. This was a company-wide. No, this happened in Jersey. Just a particular one. This happened in Jersey. Yeah, okay. It was a specific location in New Jersey. So, I was going to make some sort of comment about the TGIF clientele, and maybe specifically the New Jersey clientele. I mean, to the tune of $500,000, they don't really know their alcohol? Because I've been places like, okay, I need a Jose Cuervo tequila in my margarita, and I'm getting it, and I'm like, yeah, that's not. Yeah,

it's like Jose. And there's not even that much difference between Jose and Rotgut tequila, and I can tell the difference. Yeah. So, at least they finally figured it out in New Jersey. Probably some visitor. Well, what's cool is one of the comments says, if you're going to TGI to have a drink, then you should go to a real bar. And that was kind of my gist of it as well. Yeah. Go there to eat. Food's okay. Yeah. All right. And no other what? I don't know how many times I can take that. What's it good? I'm over. My ear's bleeding. All right. You have been listening to the most popular SEO and internet marketing podcast on iTunes. In fact, you've been listening in a really fine fashion because of our new wired microphones that have crisp sound. Crisp sound. Like you should have heard all of that. Crisp. And Chuck sounds deeper even. So, now we have to pay him more. Thank you guys for tuning in. Thank you for making us the most popular internet marketing and SEO podcast on iTunes. We really do appreciate you. Please hit us up. Follow us on our Facebook page. Send us an email. Podcast at e-wolfstyle.com. Let us know what you're thinking, feeling, wanting to do. Ask us some questions. We'll ask you some questions. If you've got any white papers, some weird experiences that you've had in the SEO arena, send those to us. We'd love to share them and comment on them. I love, we love reading white papers on SEO. It's just like, really? That worked? And really? That didn't work? That kind of thing. Yeah. So, we really do. Like, we're not just saying anything. Yeah. We don't have just somebody we give it to to read. We actually read it. Thank you guys for tuning in. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. So, Louis, bye-bye for now. Slightly raised up eyebrow, high brow. Headed my way.