As part of Research & Marketing Strategies (RMS) ongoing strategic initiative to progress our social media marketing efforts, I attended a GetListed.org conference at Driver’s Village on Tuesday, May 22nd.  The half-day conference included speakers from Google, Bing, and GetListed.org – detailing ways to improve your business’s search engine results online.  The conference was well attended, and the staff was well-prepared for the audience providing print outs of all of the slides.

Here are five key takeaways I learned from the GetListed.org Local University conference:

1. Unique Content is King – we already knew this but it was hammered home during the conference.  Creating unique content on your website and blog is the lynch-pin in a successful Internet marketing strategy.  Make your content unique, educational, resourceful and specific.  Duplicated content severely harms your ability to be noticed and ranked on search engines.
2. Create Engaging Content – another thing that is a must in social media.  Social media efforts should not be a one way road and all content should encourage responses.  Pose questions, encourage comments, reward dialogue with continuous responses. Engagement builds relationships.  One-way social media is static.
3. Social Television – consumers have short attention spans and many are multi-tasking with many different electronic devices at once (watching TV while on the phone, watching TV while on the tablet, searching the web while talking on the phone).  This is a growing trend and, as a result, companies are changing how they market.  Most, if not all, commercials list social media platforms or websites to visit.  It’s one thing to be noticed, but what really works is getting the consumer to proactively “take the next step.”
4. Excuses for Not Blogging – one thing I disagreed with that was brought up by a few different vendors was lack of time being a reason to not blog.  For most companies there is a limitless amount of content to blog about.  Each blog post doesn’t have to be a well-scripted novel but rather a short posting that educates, informs, or answers questions.  Or it can simply be an opinion.  There is always time for blogging, especially once you see the positive effects of doing so.
5. How to start? Some small businesses will start their social media efforts blindly, which in some cases works just fine.  But it makes sense to find out a few things about your potential users before you get started.  Find out which sites they are using, what they are searching for, and what they want to learn.  It almost seems too simple.  Also seems like a perfect opportunity to plug RMS and market research.  Don’t know how to get started with social media?  Let RMS survey your customers and non-customers and give you detailed data on the appropriate platforms and messages you’ll want to convey.  If you are interested, visit our website here for more information about our services.

If you attended the conference, we’d like to hear what other key takeaways you had from the presentations (this abides to key takeaway 2 above.)  Comment below!