Welcome to 2013: The year of Social Proof.
This case study sends signals back to a specific website and tracks the rankings. Internet marketing use to just be about getting blog links and creating an email list. Fast forward to today and we see the results of getting all different types of social backlinks that Google, Yahoo, and Bing love.
Video to follow along:
The test subject:
BookmarkingBeast is a website we own; we decided to invest $ for social signals and for this case study. If you go to the main website: http://bookmarkingbeast.com you can see all the social sharing options in the top left. We had Google+, Facebook, Linkedin, etc for awhile, but just recently ramped up our efforts on Pinterest, Twitter and Youtube to see if we could get results.
The setup:
Create 40 different Twitter messages and have them retweeted approximately 30 times.
Create 40 different Pins and have them repinned approximately 30 times.
Create 40 raw video files and upload to Youtube, vimeo, dailymotion and metacafe.
Proof of work done:
Twitter search is suprisingly ineffective, but you can use the API to see bookmarkingbeast has over 4k retweets: http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://bookmarkingbeast.com/
Pinterest, on the other hand, is very easy to track. You can simply go here: http://pinterest.com/source/bookmarkingbeast.com/ and see all the pins/repins you have for your website, or use their API (currently not showing correct#) for total: http://api.pinterest.com/v1/urls/count.json?callback=&url=http://bookmarkingbeast.com
Here is snapshot of all the pins/repins going on for BookmarkingBeast. Granted, all use the same one, but this is just to show you how powerful you can spread your message / website across Pinterest. Also notice, each description used a keyword phrase we wanted to rank higher for. We did this same approach for Twitter, i.e. keyword phrase1 http://yourwebsitehere.com, keywordphrase2 http://yourwebsitehere.com
Youtube and vimeo allow clickable backlinks in the videos. This is one of the most known, yet under utilized tactic by online marketers. What good is the knowledge of it’s power if you don’t use it, right? We created 40 videos. Here is one example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxxuXIcMMq0
Notice not only does the video link back to bookmarkingbeast, but it also ranks for: do follow social bookmarking sites
The result (all that matters 😛 ):
BookmarkingBeast had other social signals and a small amount of traditional links before we launched this Pinterest + Twitter + Youtube campaign. At the time it wasn’t ranking for any of the phrases in the Meta title, which the main one is: social bookmarking service. Now we see it cracking the top 10 for not only this phrase, but many related ones as well. We see more search engine traffic and our signups have increased. I don’t know if it’s the 100th monkey principle, but it appears more people are aware of the service and when social bookmarking services are mentioned or software, bookmarkingbeast is usually involved in the conversation.
Actions you can take:
If you don’t have a Twitter, Pinterest and Youtube account you need to create them. Every website and webpage you have should be linked back to through these social sites. You can do this manually, hire someone, or use our quality trusted services (same ones used for this case study). Twitterbacklinks.com , PinterestBacklinks.com , and we are launching our Video marketing / youtube backlinks site soon.
To achieve these results would be the equivalent of an Enterprise plan for Twitterbacklinks $150, Pro PinterestBacklinks $90, and our youtube service (40 videos x $15 for creation, upload, promotion). This represents an investment of around $840, with most being video expenses. Between other social signals and a small amount of blog backlinks, this brings the total investment to around $1000. The reason we feel confident putting money into our own services is because social proof is not a fad, and it’s important to invest capital back into research to understand what works and what doesn’t. This works on a large scale, and I’m assuming it will on a small scale (just harder to gauge). Google is still king of the internet and it wants to be fed social signals. The three listed here should keep it full for awhile 🙂
