Top 3 Social SEO

What are the 3 most useful surveys of social marketing SEO insights?

I’ve picked 3 of the year based on a mix of metrics such as comments, inbound links, pageviews and social engagement off the blog through social news, bookmarking and Twitter.

Here is my Top 3 selection of social media SEO posts of 2009.

1. Rules of Social Media Optimization

Rohit (vice president for interactive marketing with Ogilvy Public Relations) has written an excellent piece called 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO). For those involved with the web, we know this is quickly becoming a very important area (as social sites are dominating the web landscape).

2. Social Media and SEO: 5 Essential Steps to Success
The intersection of search engine optimization and social media is often one sided. Social media practitioners see the relationship and community building benefits while many SEOs focus on promotion and link building benefits. This guest post on Mashable offers specific tips and examples of how to incorporate the best of both worlds: Social SEO.

3. What are the top digital marketing tactics for 2010?

With millions of self professed 'social media experts' regurgitating a handful of original ideas, a vacuum exists for practical examples of what social media can mean to advance business goals.

So much for all the wisdom. What about some very handy free tools to check out what they say about your brand?

Near free social media tools for monitoring your brand

Effective social media and social SEO efforts begin with social media monitoring. Such tools can be difficult for marketing dollars strapped organizations to justify, so here's a review of 5 free and low cost tools.

1. Trackur

This social media monitoring tool from ORM expert Andy Beal tracks nearly every element of online media, from blogs, RSS feeds and Tweets, to images and video. Trackur provides the ability to not only view conversations about a brand, but also view the increasing or decreasing volume of the conversation. That way, users can be alerted to any spikes in buzz from a product launch or a negative event. Plus, Trackur offers analysis of any website mentioning a term being monitored, allowing users to distinguish how influential that site is. Monthly subscriptions to Trackur start at $18 per month.

2. PostRank Analytics

PostRank provides engagement scores to gauge how well pieces of content (i.e., a blog post, a news article) convinced users to take action (i.e., re-Tweet, a blog post comment, an RSS view). But beyond that, this social media monitoring tool shows the messages and comments from other sites that are contributing to the engagement score. In addition to individual pieces of content, this free service also maps out engagement activity and number of page views for entire blogs or websites per day. PostRank also offers integration with Google Analytics. Cost is $9 per month to track 5 sites. The image below illustrates a single post analysis with both engagement metrics and pageviews.



Postrank

3. Google Alerts

This free tool from Google provides email updates of the latest relevant Google search results. It’s as simple as choosing a search term, determining the type of search results to be tracked (news, blogs, web, video, etc.), selecting update frequency and entering an email address. Google Alerts is one of the easiest ways to monitor brand mentions for both company and product names. Plus, the tool can be leveraged to monitor competitor mentions.

4. Social Mention

Similar to Google Alerts, Social Mention – a real-time search engine – aggregates search results from blogs, microblogs, videos, bookmarks and other social sites. But this free monitoring tool goes a step beyond that. Social Mention provides a social ranking score based on popularity for every search (i.e., how often the search term is mentioned, if the sentiment is positive/neutral/negative). All of this data can even be compiled into a CVS or Excel spreadsheet.

5. TechrigySM2

SM2 is a software solution designed specifically for PR and Marketing Agencies to monitor and measure social media. The “freemium” version of this full featured social media monitoring service allows you to create up to 5 profiles and each query is limited to storing up to 1,000 search results. There are many features with setup and reports as you can see in the screen shot below. Along with standard help and FAQ resources, there’s a Ning powered Techrigy social network or Community of users that you can tap into and share information.