More Yahoo! Social Media Strategies

Yahoo! Answers For Brand and Link BuIlding

Yahoo recently announced a new mission statement –  to “connect people” and as Dr. Hunter Madsen said in his keynote on the impact of social media, Yahoo! has long been focused on building communities.

They are now building what they call ‘brand universes.’  Pontiac Underground is a great example of how to do this – Yahoo! groups, Answers, Flickr and more all in one social  space under a brand umbrella.

Yahoo! Answers has some great link and brand building opportunities.  It’s a knowledge sharing Q&A based social network with over 90 million users worldwide with around 18 million users in the United States.

Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal has a list of ideas on how to build your reputation and market your site, business and services on Yahoo Answers.

Becoming the pinnacle Social Media offering online because of its ease of use and community feel, Yahoo Answers is a vibrant web neighborhood of information sharing and a fresh alternative to traditional web search.

Here is Loren’s list of to-do’s:

Become a member of Yahoo Answers, upload avatar and fill in your profile with general and accurate information.

Pick the category most relevant to your business or site.

Check that category daily for questions that you can answer accurately and informatively.

Perform searches in Yahoo for your top keywords or keyphrases. Answer the questions supplied by Yahoo Answers in the normal Yahoo Search results, these will get the most web search eyes and possibly clicks on your links.

Use the Yahoo Answers social network to make friends with every person asking or answering questions within that category. Yahoo Answers uses a one click Ajax tool for adding friends (contacts) which is very efficient.

Answer the questions that you can and link to your site as a reference when best suited.

Link to other sites as references so your participation is not mistaken as spamming.

If others are answering questions more accurately than you, star or vote for their answers, this is a good way to make friends.

Take two or three hours a week to perform this simple yet effective social media participation, then check your log files or stats to see if this is building traffic and conversions. If it is, rinse and repeat.

Also take into account that Yahoo Answers information will be indexed by Yahoo for a long time, this is not just a quick marketing fix. Yahoo Answers info is also integrated into Yahoo Local, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Brand Channels and other Yahoo content channels, so the audience is growing significantly

Great ideas.  Read the full post for more