Digital Media Social Enterprise

Lets Go Global, currently celebrating our 10th anniversary, is about to become the first Trafford Council service to transition out of the local authority following the Cabinet Office supported Mutual Support Programme (MSP) and is setting up as an independent Social Enterprise. We combine art, education, film-making and digital development and training.

We’re going to be working with Make it Happen consultancy to develop our business and services so that we can create a sustainable future for our team and the work we do.

Search and Social Media Marketing – What is it?

The Search and Social Media Marketing course came at a perfect time for us.

We just started our development process this week and I’m already actively integrating the tools and techniques I learnt on the course into our communications strategy and marketing campaign.

We’ve been using social media quite extensively for some time already, but I came to the course knowing little about Search Engine Optimisation and Search Marketing. I thought SEO was all and only about page ranking in Google and optimising a website.

How wrong I was! While I’m still no SEO expert, I’ve gained a really good understanding of how Search and Social Media Marketing can and must be included in the arc of a communications plan.

Understanding the bigger picture.

From invaluable information about your customers and their user experience on your website, to product placement online and using link building to create a brand profile as well as drive traffic to your site, this course has really informed me about some great tools I can use to enhance our online and offline presence.

We’re relaunching our brand later this year, and we’ve got some great ideas now about a social media campaign leading up to and during our launch events, creating and sharing real-time content, made by us, and by our the event attendees, hopefully creating some really valuable, ‘juicy’ links and a pool of people invested in sharing our news.

We’ve got a new website coming, with the help of FreshSpring – a web developers specialising in customised WordPress themes. It was designed before the course started, but happily, Freshspring are really good at making sure the design & sitemap is SEO friendly, and I can work on getting the copy and website completely optimised and nice and sparkling, ready for launch!

What’s next?

I still feel like I’ve got a lot of homework to do! I need to tackle that reading list – the ‘SEO bible’ – The Arts of SEO – Mastering Search Engine Optimisation is at the top, and I’ll be revisiting the Linkedin site & twitter hashtag #ssmmUoS, which by the way, worked really well.

But I’ve had a glimpse inside the number crunching world of SEO, algorithms, spiders and robots and found out that, after all, it’s all about people.

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