Yesterday I attended the Ebusiness Club conference in Nottingham, an excellent series of training events in the East Midlands which are always widely popular (500+ filled the house today) and delivered by top-notch expert trainers. These events are exactly the sort of things the public sector should support as they build capacity and skills in businesses to stay competitive in the digital space. Most digital training programmes tend to be for big FMCG brands, corporates or the public sector so the Ebusiness Club approach for small businesses is always really valuable and refreshing.
Today’s trainers were Ian Lockwood – a charismatic uber-nerd of tech search – and Susan Hallam, the first lady of web marketing, discussing social media trends for small businesses. A few highlights from their presentations which are relevant to those creating a digital strategy and publishing compelling digital content:
Trends in search and Google
Google Caffeine is the new version of Google, rolling out in January 2010 after the Christmas e-sales run. No major shake-up of search engine optimisation is needed, but the new engine will include greater emphasis on results of domain authority (meaning your site is even more likely to rank below results from national/international names like Wikipedia and BBC), web loading speed is viewed as important (aim for a load speed of 2-3 seconds, you can test your site’s speed here) and, most significantly, real-time search of social media will show in search results. This means that having a strong social media presence, blogging and ensuring people are talking about your site in social media channels will become increasingly important.
Bing will become an important player in search when its buy-out of Yahoo! search is complete, then having a 7% market share which is likely to grow. Fortuitously, the rules of optimisation for Bing are much the same as Google, also favouring fast-loading smaller (under 150kb) pages and links from authoratitive sites.
More worrying, Google are developing new ways of embedding itself in the conversion stream – with more pages, more ads and more inventory spaces for their adverts between the searcher and the search results, with solutions like similar search phrases. Google’s “less than free” model seeks to eradicate the competition, like their free satnav technology with embedded adverts which are seriously disrupting the steady-state business of TomTom and Garmin.
Trends in social media
Too many small businesses have jumped into social media with two feet and created a messy splash: it’s time to step back and look at your strategy for how and why you engage with others in social media to increase conversion. Twitter needs a clear approach: make tweets which signal you as an expert, make an announcement, or signpost to other sources. Set up a programme of tweets about offers, announcements, new products or expertise.
The top four most re-tweeted subjects are:
1. Asking questions (you may get plenty of answers!)
2. Tips and tricks
3. Humourous or funny (use with caution)
4. Breaking news
Facebook ads also may be a valuable tools for specialist and local businesses: unlike Google pay-per-click which focuses on the search term not the user, Facebook ads allow you to display your adverts to users from specific areas, with specific demographics or with specific interests in their profiles (which explains why all I see is adverts for cat products, despite not having a cat).
Susan also advises having a seperate business account and personal account on Facebook, and using administrator business profiles to create groups and pages for businesses, not employees or individual’s personal profiles. Her top tip for small businesses operating in the social media spaces is to get blogging: it’s free, it builds credibility and an audience and all that fresh new content is great for search engines too.
Great to meet so many local business folks at the event fired up to do more with their online marketing and social media. There were lots of people tweeting too, which doesn’t often happen at events in Nottingham – I think we’re turning a corner here.
If you’re a Midlands business and are looking to develop a digital strategy, have a look at my current programme of support as you may qualify for up to £1,000 of grant funding from Business Link (woo!).
And a final plug…if you’re a business based in Notts doing anything creative/digital related, please send your stories for us to publish over at Creative Nottingham.
