Social Media and SEO
Recently I had an interesting discussion about social media and the effects it has on SEO. The main focus we couldn’t escape talking about the famous “Dominos Pizza YouTube Incident.” The incident It happened quite a while ago, but I’m pretty sure everybody’s seen at least part of the famous YouTube video where Dominos employees Kristy and Michael film themselves doing some pretty disgusting things to the food.
The main area of the discssion was the Dominos video because it’s an excellent example of viral media, using social media, and how social media relates to SEO. Shortly after it was uploaded to YouTube, the video was being spread around the web at one of the faster rates recorded for viral content. On its first day, over 1 million people viewed the video – even before the news stations started running the story.
The larger scale effect of the video was seen shortly after the story began airing on the nightly news and showing up in newspapers across the country. The video had such a negative impact on Dominos that a search for their company name at the time returned only the Dominos homepage, the actual video, and 8 other pages related to Kristy and Michael sticking cheese up their noses.
Prior to this incident Dominos didn’t have a social media presence at all, and it showed by their lack of saturation in the search engine results pages (SERPS.) When we talk about search engine saturation, we’re referring to how many of the top 10 results for a brand name are actually controlled by that brand – and it’s an important aspect in both SEO and social media. Having a high SERP saturation not only allows you to control the messaging for your brand, but it also helps customers interact with and engage your brand in more ways.
To their credit, Dominos handling of the event was almost perfect. They started out by posting a reply to the original video right on YouTube. Instead of burying their response in a press release that hardly anybody would see, or buying a full page ad in the New York Times, Dominos took their response to where the discussion started and was still taking place. They also created a Twitter account and hired somebody to monitor Twitter and answer questions from anybody who would ask.
These were all the right things to do, but the fallout would have been a lot worse if Dominos had established a social media presence prior to the video incident. If they had, a search for “dominos” would have showed less bad news coverage and more of their Twitter account, Facebook page, YouTube videos, and other pages.
Hosting a video on YouTube (or another video site) rather than hosting it on your company site can offer multiple advantages. Search engines have gotten extremely efficient at indexing and discovering videos posted to the popular video sites, and will most likely index them quicker. Embedding the video on your own site also increases its “view count” on the video site – which may be used as a ranking factor. Of course hosting a video on a 3rd party site also opens that video up for comments and discussion, so you’ll have to actively monitor and engage in that discussion to get the full benefit.
In addition to helping engage customers, social media can also serve as an essential SEO offering as well. A good social media offering can help out your SEO team by increasing exposure in search results, building relevant inbound links, helping control brand perception, and increasing universal search efforts.
Using social media effectively makes seeding new content and increasing awareness much easier – and should be an essential, ongoing part of any SEO campaign, rather than an afterthought or a reaction to a tragedy.