Many times I have advocated the importance of using a variety of social media channels as a search visibility strategy for your targeted keywords, because it works.

I have successfully used LinkedIn, Facebook, SlideShare, YouTube, Squidoo, Twitter, Blogger, WordPress and others to generate top of the fold page one search placement.

Recently I have conducted an extensive test to see which tools are more search friendly and timely for providing search placement for my name. Here are the results in terms of best to worst search visibility over a 72 hour period for an individual name:

1. Zoom Info
2. LinkedIn
3. WordPress blog
4. SlideShare
5. Squidoo
6. Blogger blog
7. YouTube

I prefer WordPress over Blogger because it provides an automatic XML site map submission to Google every time a post is made. It works well and it works fast. WordPress is also far more flexible and customizable. You can do virtually anything with it.

Blogger on the other hand is a lot easier and faster to set-up. I have also found that if you host a Blogger blog on your own URL it will be crawled almost as fast as WordPress.

SlideShare appears to be more effective at creating instant and higher search visibility than YouTube. I have also taken note that with 13 advertising videos on YouTube vs. 15 advertising slide presentations on SlideShare, the videos received 114 downloads in a week compared to 1,556 slide downloads, and the videos had a 3 day head start.

The "Conversation Prism" represents the multitude of conversation channels, but it also represents the many opportunities for search visibility, idea exchange and concept proliferation. Social media channels therefore really serve multiple purposes, and are the perfect enhancement to an online integrated marketing strategy.

For a full size version see the source: http://theconversationprism.com/1280