It might seem like a simple decision, that is, until you look at the enormous list of social media platforms that are available. Social Networks have changed marketing forever; there is no doubt about it. Now it’s up to you to figure out which one is right for your business. With new platforms popping up every day, choosing the right one can be a daunting task. Here are a few things to consider that will help you decide which social media(s) to stick with and which to hold out on.

Where is Your Audience?

More importantly, where are your influencers? This is the first and most important step when deciding on a social media platform for your business. You cannot, I repeat, you cannot take a guess at this number. You are going to have to dig in and find the actual data. Some things to consider when searching for the social platforms where your customers are active:

• Use Google Analytics:

  Analytics data can show you which social media platforms are providing you with the most traffic. Google Analytics has a built in social report that allows you to see which social sources are referring traffic to your business’ website.

• Use Social Crawlytics:

  One of my favorite tools to measure social impact is Social Crawlytics. This tool allows you to identify your most shared content, and for our purpose, it can be used to identify which platform your audience is using to share your information (and it’s free!). You simply enter your business URL and a report will be generated that breaks down the amount of shares per network.

• Just ask:

  You can always ask your influencers. Social Media is all about communicating directly with your audience, so why not begin by asking them about their social media use? Don’t be afraid, you may even find out there is an unmet need in a social media you may not have considered before.

Where is Your Competition?

Look for the social media platforms that your competitors participating in. What are your competitors doing on those platforms? Is their audience responding positively? What are they doing right or wrong?  These are all questions you should ask yourself when looking into competitors’ social presence.

Here, again, you will be able to use Social Crawlytics to look into their social activity and gain a better understanding of where your audience might be. HubSpot has a helpful guide that demonstrates how to analyze your competition on social media; it’s worth your time to check it out.

As important as it is to see what your competition is doing, it is just as important to realize that they may be missing opportunities. Be sure to note which platforms they are on and which ones they aren’t on. At the end of the day you don’t want to be copying your competition, you want to differentiate yourself from them.

Test Drive

Have a list of social media platforms that you think might be a good fit for your business? Take them for a spin! Sign up with personal accounts and dive into the world of each particular social network. You will be able to dive deeper into audience behavior and your competitors’ strategies.

So what should you do? Stalk them. Well not really, but if you know who some of your most influential customers are, take a look at their social activity. Where are they? Who do they follow? Do they engage with other brands? Do they have more than one profile across different social platforms? This will help you better understand how certain customers act on each social network.

During this testing period you should follow your competitors as well. This will give you a better idea of how active they are, how engaged users are and how many followers they have. You can also look into their biggest advocates. How do they show support for the brand? Is there something that you could be doing better than they are? Do those influencers follow other brands as well?

This is a great time to learn behaviors as well as etiquette for each particular social media platform. You don’t want to be that brand that misuses hashtags(#) and web acronyms.

Evaluate

What could possibly go wrong? This is a question that you should take very seriously. A lot can go wrong; just take a look at some of the biggest social media fails of 2012. Don’t fret, there were plenty of wins that outweigh the losses.

Be sure that you understand the reason behind why people engage on each platform. Also know what ticks them off. After taking the time to look into each of the networks, you will be able to evaluate which platform will be best for your business. The best suited platforms should be those where your audience is engaged and open to participation with brands.

The winning platforms should allow for easy integration and most importantly, should be helpful for your customers. At the end of the day you want to be able to get the best information out there to your audience.

Devote Time

Before you make your final decision on choosing which platform(s) to choose, take an honest look at how much time you will be able to devote to stay active on social media.  Do not overstretch yourself. Using only one platform and staying active on it is preferable to creating multiple pages and leaving them abandoned. Social media interactions happen in real time.

Are you prepared to engage your audience and take advantage of timely opportunities? If you are in charge of choosing a social media platform for your business, you should also look into the amount of time it will take to build a following and effectively integrate it with all of your other marketing efforts.

Know that social media is not a “set it and forget it” solution. The best social media managers are those that devote the time to listen to users, plan campaigns, test various tactics, analyze data and do it all over again. In short, the right Social Media strategy takes up time, and lots of it.

Have Fun

Social Media opens the front door of your business and shows it to the entire world. People enjoy seeing brands that have personality. The social media that you decide to be on will be a platform from which to portray your personality.

As you can see, a brand like Taco Bell will be more active on Twitter as opposed to LinkedIn. So don’t be afraid to have some fun! I hope the daunting task of choosing a social media is lightened with this simple guide.

Have you chosen a social media platform for your business? Do you have any personal success stories or disaster stories on Social Media? Did I leave anything out? Let me know in the comments section.

Images from: Jev55 and PDXdj.

The post Choosing The Right Social Media Platform For Your Business appeared first on .

I came across this unanswered question a while back on Quora: Why is there a need to focus on Hispanic Search? I was surprised to see that it didn’t have a single response, especially given the fact that it was asked over two years ago. While there can be many arguments made for and against targeting Hispanics in search, I decided to look at actual examples of companies who are running search ads in Spanish. The following are three examples of Hispanic targeting in search. I hope to shed some light on why other companies are targeting Hispanics and why you might want to as well.

Targeting Hispanics in Search: Carros Usados

“Carros usados” means “used cars” in Spanish. I began with this term because it receives a very high 9,900 exact searches/month in the US alone. My search on Google generated three advertisements on top of the organic results and many more on the right side. This means that there is healthy competition for a popular search term in Spanish. Score one point in the argument for reaching Hispanics in search – your competitors might be doing it.

After a closer look at a few of the companies you can see a willingness to reach out to the Hispanic market, but not always proper execution. Some of these companies are actively reaching out to Hispanics with websites in Spanish and social media accounts in Spanish but it seems that others have made efforts on a much smaller scale. For example, AutoTrader.com has a Spanish ad and a Spanish landing page, but no website dedicated to Hispanic customers. Digging a little further I found that AutoTrader has a Twitter in Spanish that has not been updated since November of 2011, and has a low number of followers.  Toyota, on the other hand, seems to have a long track record of reaching out to Hispanics, with some very successful campaigns. A quick look at their web presences shows a website that is fully in Spanish and active Spanish social media accounts on Twitter and Facebook. It is clear that some companies are “all in” while others are applying more of a scaled-back approach.

Targeting Hispanics in Search: Vuelos a

The next search term I tested was “vuelos a” which means “flights to”. Again, there was a healthy amount of competition at the top of the page for a term that gets a broad monthly search of 201,000 in the US, and plenty of competition on the sides. I dove a little deeper to see how two different companies were reaching out to Hispanics. The first, cheap-o-air, seemed to have a small portion of their website in Spanish but the majority of their site was in English. The second company, cheap-flights.com, had a landing page that was completely written in English. I found it curious that these two companies would spend money on targeting Spanish speakers, yet not make the effort to create a landing page in Spanish once a user decides to follow through with a click.

One company that seemed to be doing it right was American airlines. Although their ad was at the bottom of the pack, once I clicked there I was happy to see a completely Spanish landing page and website. One thing that surprised me was the fact that a company like Southwest Airlines, who have a Spanish website, would send clicks to their English site. (They didn’t even have Spanish ad copy). I found this odd since Southwest, as recently as of last October, announced that they would be targeting Hispanics.

Targeting Hispanics in Search: Zapatos para correr

The last search I tried was for “zapatos para correr” or “running shoes”. One of the most interesting things that I found about this search term, which gets only 480 broad searches per month in the US, is that almost all of the ads came back in English. I tried again, this time switching my default language in Google to Spanish, only to find that the English ads still outnumbered the Spanish ads. It looked as though these companies were targeting Hispanic keywords but not bothering to write Spanish copy.

With terms that are highly competitive, such as “zapatos para correr”, it is important to differentiate yourself form the competition. I see a huge hole here that only a handful of companies are filling, the need for Spanish copy and a Spanish landing page when targeting keywords in Spanish. I would argue that the brands that make this effort will have an advantage over brands that, as in this example, are simply targeting the keywords and not personalizing the experience.

Is there a need to focus on Hispanic Search Marketing?

The conclusion that I can draw is that yes, there is a need to focus on Hispanic Search Marketing. Why? Because so many companies already are, and so many are doing it wrong. The demand is there, Google’s keyword tool shows us that there are many searches made in the US in the Spanish language per month. The question instead should now be “how best can I reach Hispanics in search?” Three quick searches gave us some great examples of what to do and what not to do. You read it everywhere; everyone knows Hispanics are continuing to grow their purchasing power. The need is there, now companies need to learn how to execute.

Image via jluster

The post Should You Focus on Hispanics in Search Marketing? appeared first on .

Welcome to our data hub on Spanish Speaking Countries! This page will continually be updated with new content and up-to-date statistics. Feel free to browse the data we have gathered from various resources. All of the information on this page is provided for educational purposes. This post was inspired by Spanish SEO’s resource on Spanish Speakers Worldwide here.

List of Spanish Speaking Countries

Population as of July 2011

*Predominantly English

Spanish Speaking Countries GDP (Purchasing Power Parity)

Number of Internet Users by Country

Total Hours Online per Visitor per Month in Latin America

Latin American Audience Online

Latam Online Audience Average VS Worldwide Average

Resources:
http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpop/table_population.php
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2119.html
Comscore Latin America Review 2010

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
All information may be published if the source is properly stated with an active link to Dalai Group.

The post Spanish Speaking Countries and Online Audience Statistics appeared first on .

Your first year as an SEO is bound to be a true learning experience. Here are three of the most important lessons that I’ve learned  from wonderful teachers, countless hours of research and most of all, through practice. I hope these will point you in the right direction as you begin your career as an SEO.

Lesson #1 – Relationships are everything

Relationship building is more important than link building. The sooner you realize this the quicker you will be on the road to success in this (and really any) industry. The biggest hurdle that you will run into is building relationships from behind a computer screen.

Being sincere and genuine online is the best advice that I can give you. Building relationships is infinitely easier when you help others. Give a fellow SEO hints and tips that they could implement on their website if they’re on the SEOMoz Q&A boards. Let a blogger know that you’re a fan and that you’ve subscribed to their newsletter. Build relationships with bloggers even if they are not in your industry. Your efforts will only be appreciated if you are REAL. Don’t fake it, be genuine.

Lesson #2 – Great SEOs focus on user experience

In the heart of every SEO there is a trailblazing marketer in the digital age. The best marketers have a knack for understanding what the customer wants and needs at every stage of the marketing funnel. Once you master this type of empathy, you will begin to “get it”.

Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz as well as other industry leaders (Wil Reynolds, Ian Lurie, Neil Patel) continually stress the importance of the user and doing what is best for them. Too many SEOs get caught up in Google rankings as opposed to user intent and experience. We can’t control search engine algorithms, so let’s take control of the value that a website can offer to a customer.

Lesson #3 – Creativity drives success

Search Engine Optimization requires a lot of creativity. This can be the most intimidating as well as exciting part of being an SEO. You are this generation’s Mad Men. To be good at this job you need to constantly be thinking outside the box. Each website is unique and there is no one size fits all solution.

I like to think that creativity is bred out of a mix of knowledge, entertainment and distraction. My personal advice: know the ins and outs of your client and their goals. Next, brainstorm a ton of ideas. Finally, take a breath and go have some fun (at least move on to something different). Repeat this process until you get an “ah-ha!” moment. Many times I have found that it is when I’m not thinking about a client’s strategy that my best ideas come to mind.

Let me know what you guys think about the lessons I’ve learned and post anything else that might be useful in the comments. I’m sure a ton experienced SEOs will have very valuable info to share with our young SEOs in training.

Photo by Cristiano Betta

The post Three Important Lessons For a First Year SEO appeared first on .

We are pleased to announce the launch of Dalai Group’s new and improved website, and with it, our newly designed blog! We hope that you find it easy to navigate and full of useful Internet Marketing knowledge. If you have any questions or concerns you may contact us using the contact form here or by e-mailing us at info@dalaigroup.com.

We’re excited about the upcoming blog posts. Here we will keep you up to date with the latest news in the industry, happenings in our company, and anything else that we think will help you stay informed and up-to-date in our ever changing field of online marketing. If you have questions or topics for discussion, we’ll be happy to hear what you have to say! We look forward to lending a helping hand to all you marketing aficionados out there.

The post Dalai Group Relaunches Website appeared first on .