Social Media

Keyword research isn't just for search marketing. It's also a highly effective method for social media marketing. Whether your target audience is on YouTube or Twitter, your social media marketing efforts should start with determining which keywords they're using. That way you can match your message to their interests.

With that, I've put together The Experts' Guide to Keyword Research for Social Media. In this comprehensive guide, I give detailed instructions on how (and why) to conduct keyword research for social media, and I break it down with tips and techniques for research keywords on four of the most popular social media platforms: Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook. Enjoy!

Chris Brogan is President of New Marketing Labs, a new media marketing agency, and home of the Inbound Marketing Summit conferences and Inbound Marketing Bootcamp educational events. He works with large and mid-sized companies to improve online business communications like marketing and PR through the use of social software, community platforms, and other emerging web and mobile technologies. Chris is also co-author of the book Trust Agents, with Julien Smith. For more information, read his blog or follow him on Twitter.

What are the first three things someone should do if they have little to no social presence and want to change that?

Tamar Weinberg is a freelance writer, blogger, and social media strategist. Her specialties are blogger outreach, content promotion, community management, and viral strategy. In July 2009, Tamar published “The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web,” which covers the gamut of social media marketing topics in an easy-to-understand format. Tamar is also the community and marketing manager for Mashable, the top ranked blog on all things social media. She maintains her own blog on social media marketing strategy at Techipedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tamar/.

Regardless of which candidate you supported in the January 19 special election to fill the seat vacated by Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, there is one thing that should make Internet marketers proud: The first poll to correctly predict the election outcome was a social media poll published on Thursday, January 14.

Traditional polls were showing a close race, and before the Suffolk News 7 Poll, the Blue Mass Group/R2000 poll, the PPP Poll, PMJ/CrossTarget poll, or even the Rasmussen Poll – which all later showed Scott Brown pulling ahead – a social media poll published on our very own blog showed that Scott Brown held a significant edge over Martha Coakley in social media engagement metrics, including:

After the popularity of last week's social media poll on Scott Brown vs. Martha Coakley (Larry's prediction actually turned out to be right!), we thought it would be fun to see who's winning in the "race" between erstwhile Tonight Show host Jay Leno and his successor Conan O'Brien, who, it's all but certain, will leave NBC after the network proposed giving his show back to Leno and pushing him back to a later, less coveted slot.

A lot of very vocal Conan fans aren't too happy about the change, but ratings are what really matter to NBC, presumably, so there must be a lot of Leno fans out there too, right? We looked at some social media metrics to see who has the most supporters in the online sphere.

Alexander B. Howard is the associate editor of SearchCompliance.com at TechTarget. His work there focuses on how regulations affect IT operations, including issues of data protection, privacy, security and enterprise strategy. Prior to joining TechTarget, he worked as a knowledge broker, Web designer, carpenter, garde manger, teacher, health columnist and IT consultant. Alexander graduated from Colby College in 1998 with a bachelor's degree in biology and sociology. In his spare time, he enjoys running with his greyhound, reading, microblogging, fishing, cycling, gardening, cooking and hiking. Learn more at his blog or follow him on Twitter: @digiphile.

What role does social media play in your job (or career, if you prefer!)? What role does it play in your personal life?

In an interview with Michael Arrington last week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told the world that Facebook is changing to keep up with it—and what the world wants, apparently, is less privacy.

Naturally, this caused a big hubbub (at least in the online marketing corner of the world), with many claiming Facebook is acting against its users' best interests, trying to trick them into doing what will increase Facebook revenue—or, rather, into not doing what won't help its revenue. By not changing the now-default settings, users will (perhaps unintentionally) make their data more public and searchable.

Others leapt to Facebook's defense. This is the way society is moving, they said; get over it.

Are you new to Twitter and unsure who to follow? Not so new to Twitter but still don't know who to follow? Or maybe you just want to make more connections, find new resources and learn from the best?

Twitter lists are a great way to keep up with the search marketing industry. You can follow a whole swath of thought leaders, hand-picked and pre-approved by those in the know, with one quick click.

These 16 Twitter lists were curated by (and include) some of our favorite voices in search and online marketing. (And while you're at it, follow the WordStream list to keep up with our whole team.)

Selective Search Marketing Twitter Lists

These picky-choosy lists include fewer than 60 people or brands each.

In 2009, the scientific community treated search and social media marketers to what seemed like a never-ending supply of meaty and game-changing research projects, covering everything from information retrieval, to personalized search, to integrated SERP analysis, to studying user behavior on social networks. I decided to compile and share a list of my favorite Search and Social Media Marketing Research Projects of 2009. Hopefully, these research papers will inform and inspire your marketing efforts going into 2010.

By the way, if after reading all the papers on this list you find that you're jonesing for more, here are two great resources for marketers to find research papers on social media and search engine marketing:

I hope you're not feeling antisocial out there, because today's roundup is all about social search.

There were several big announcements this week in the world of social and real-time search. Microsoft and Google both announced agreements with Twitter. Bing's Twitter search is live, but it doesn't seem to work all that well – when I searched for my username, instead of getting a string of my tweets and @replies, I got this:

Um, OK, but why? Why doesn't it just search for my username and return all the results? I can see why the "top links shared in tweets about" thing would be interesting/useful, but why is that the default search behavior? What if that's not what you're looking for?