In-House SEO Strategy & In-House Social Media Marketing at ABCNews.com

Learn how in-house SEO strategy and in-house Social Media marketing is being accomplished at ABCNews.com.

Read the full blog post at:
http://www.instantetraining.com/blog/2010/09/eleanor-hong-abcnews-seo/

Bob Tripathi: That's a great point. The next question I want to ask you about is social media. Everyone is doing social media in some shape or form. News sites can really leverage social media and I've seen some folks do it. But at ABC News, how are you approaching social media and what are your visions or your plans to integrate social media, search and all of that stuff?

Eleanor Hong: Social media is definitely important and it's changing the landscape for a lot of media sites. We're seeing that Facebook now is one the most important sites to share news stories and to share video. It's probably catching up, if not having caught up, with Google News. I think a lot of media sites, for our site we're having an editorial group called "Audience Growth and Development", so we're tasked to really help drive traffic through search and social media and linkage and link partners. For us, we have to look at our Facebook and Twitter strategies on a daily level with editorial. A lot of our digital journalists are just so great. They already have an understanding of social media because they use it themselves. They also use social media to help with finding sources.

For ABC News, it's aligning the business goals with the social media strategies. That can come from just a working relationship with editorial and marketing. So we have our flagship shows like Good Morning America and World News. World News with Diane Sawyer has a Facebook and fans. Good Morning America has over a million Twitter followers. It's just really bringing them the content they're interested in off of those programs, that's one example. We also have our ABCnews.com verticals: again, technology, travel and business. Using those natural or conventional news categories each producer... Again I have a social media editor who's just so great, she helps with really owning and maintaining the ABC News accounts for Facebook and Twitter, and putting out what's out there and what's important and really engaging with out fans in terms of "this is the news of the moment". She is also coming up with Facebook quizzes to really engage and interact with the followers because it's not just a promo tool. I think that's the misinterpretation of social media is that Facebook and Twitter is a promo tool, and it's not. It's community. It community building, it is engagement, it's really brining them what they're looking for.

As you know with Facebook and the friends and the followers, they know and they will respond if something's skewed or something's wrong or something's off. They're going to be vocal about it. It's important to engage and understand who your fans are and to provide them the content that they're looking for. It's great for us, as a news site, because we can provide a funny video or an oddity, a medical mystery or marvel type of story, or a video of a crash, developing news or even breaking news. Instead of just email alerts of breaking news, we've moved on to social media tools. You see now, more and more journalists using social media to really get a pulse on what's developing. I think it's definitely changing the landscape. But I think old principals apply, whether they are journalism or SEO, just applying over to the social media platform.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• interview
• seo
• in house seo
• search engine optimization
• social media marketing
• abcnews.com
• information architecture
• online video
• eleanor hong