Those who have always been staunch advocates of promoting businesses through social media have probably already heard about Synnd – a social media technology that promises to expand the reach, value and life span of online content. Developed by Social Media Science (SMS), a global technology company that specializes in social media and online visibility promotion, Synnd promises to generate enough ‘social buzz’ around your content for it to go viral, thereby generating traffic and enhancing its search engine rankings along the way. How does it work and how does it deliver on its promises?
How Synnd works
In its own words, Synnd is all about ‘automation and power in numbers’. By subscribing to its services, you will get software called the ‘Remote Automator’ that will automatically create your social media accounts while doing promotions for other Synnd members – the same way their software is promoting your content. As such, you don’t really have to do any real work, apart from creating your campaigns. You just select the tasks you want the software to complete and let it do things for you.
Campaigns can be set up and monitored through the online application from any browser. With Synnd, all you have to do is create your content and start a campaign in your account (this may require creating titles and descriptions depending on the type of membership). The system will take over from there.
Basically, Synnd enhances your search engine rankings and generates incoming traffic by leveraging on the power of social proof. When content is promoted in the different Synnd modules, this is noticed both by other users, who may also decide to share it in some way, and by the search engines. With the advent of Google+1, Eric Schmidt himself, the current Executive Chairman of Google, confirmed that social signals are now being considered ranking signals. (read http://www.stateofsearch.com/eric-schmidt-confirms-the-social-signal-is-a-ranking-factor/)
The sharing of content in social media makes it more popular, timely and relevant, thus bettering its chances of making it to the top of the search engine results. Since your content is being shared by a lot of people to their own networks, you can also expect increased direct traffic over time.
Synnd works on a promotional credit system. The more promotions users decide to do for content the more credits will be required. Every month, users are awarded new credits they can use as they see fit. The number of credits awarded depends on the type of membership they have and how many promotions they do for other members through their Synnd Remote Automator. Members may also buy extra credits if they wish.
What makes Synnd special?
Synnd is different than other bookmarking and similar tools in that it is a membership site, and each member has the Synnd Remote Automator running on their computer. This not only harnesses the power of all the computers in the network to perform tasks, but it also makes the social signals those computers generate much more natural. Members are around the world and so are the signals they generate. It is like having hundreds of different people promoting your content. At a time when changes in search engine algorithms have made some SEO tools less useful, Synnd is as effective, if not more, than ever.
Content has longer life
When creating campaigns, members can set the maximum number of promotions per day. Therefore, they can keep their content on the networks and in front of more people longer by stretching the promotions out over an extended period of time.
Synnd membership packages
Synnd is available in three membership levels – Synnd Lite, Synnd Pro and Synnd Enterprise. Here is what you get with these individual packages:
Synnd Lite
With Synnd Lite, you get to try how Synnd works – for free. It has three (3) promotional modules, which include the bookmarking module, the social news and the Twitter module.
By using the bookmarking campaign, you can have hundreds of other Synnd members bookmark your links (articles, blog posts, podcasts, videos or anything with a working URL) on their own bookmarking accounts. Since each bookmark counts as a vote of confidence for your content, the search engines will see the bookmarked site as a valuable resource and reward it accordingly in terms of higher search engine rankings.
With the social news voting campaign, users can get content voted up in sites such as Reddit and StumbleUpon. Please take note; however, that Synnd by itself cannot guarantee top placements in these sites, but it can give you the momentum you need to gain more exposure and votes for your content. This means users have to make the kind of quality content that will eventually get voted up naturally.
By using the Twitter module, you can have your content tweeted and retweeted by as many as 5,000 real Twitter accounts. The lowdown on using this module is that the Twitter accounts created by the system are not targeted and may not have real followers. As such, you will not be able to get as many eyeballs to your content as you may have expected. Despite this obvious limitation, using this module can still generate enough social buzz (as far as the search engines are concerned) and social proof (your followers can see how many times your content has been tweeted) to entice readers to visit and stay on your page longer.
While you can get Synnd Lite for free, you can only use it to run one campaign at a time. It may not be enough, especially if you are planning to promote multiple sites, but you can use it to see if this particular tool can help you achieve your business goals effectively.
Synnd Pro
With Synnd Pro, you get all the promotional modules available through Synnd including Facebook likes, blog commenting, bookmarking, social news voting, Twitter and article syndication. According to Google, getting Facebook likes to your content can help it rank higher in the search engines. It can also enhance your content’s stickiness, another major factor that most search engines take into account in determining a site’s rankings.
Using the blog commenting campaign can help you get authentic (not spammy) comments on your blog (created by yourself or administrators) while the article syndication campaign can help you distribute spun versions of your articles to a number of major article directories such as EzineArticles, Article Alley, Article Cube, GoArticles and others.
Video distribution has also been added to Synnd. Videos can easily be distributed to a large number of sites and promoted through Synnd at the same time.
Synnd Enterprise
This subscription package includes all the promotional campaigns included in Synnd Pro. In addition, with the Synnd Enterprise, all you need to do is the link and select the modules to promote it with. The administrators at Synnd will set everything up and create the titles and descriptions for the campaigns. As such, this membership level is perfect for those who have a lot of websites or are doing the same work for their clients and want everything totally automated.
Synnd best practices
Here are some suggestions to make sure you get the most from subscribing to this service:
For bookmarking campaigns
- Create variations for titles, description and tags to make it appear more natural. The more variations you can come up with, the better your buzz count will be.
- Use a title that is interesting but non-promotional.
For social news voting campaigns
- Do not use the voting feature to promote sites that contain any form of advertising or are non-social in nature. It will only get rejected.
- For best results in using the voting module, promote content that satisfies the 3 E’s – entertaining, educational and/or enlightening.
- Use keyword-rich tags that are actually found within your content.
- Use an interesting title and make sure it contains the main keywords or keyword phrase.
- An interesting description also helps in generating clicks and votes.
For Twitter campaigns
- Twitter campaigns generate the best results when used for social and non-promotional sites.
Other tips to consider
- Leave your PC on. To earn the most credits, you need to leave your Remote Automator and your PC on from 8 am to 10 pm (local time).
To sum it up, Synnd may be able to generate enough social signals for your sites, but you shouldn’t be led to the idea that it can help you get higher search engine rankings without some help. You shouldn’t also expect to see your content at the top of the search engines in a matter of days. Achieving good results from using Synnd takes time. Most importantly, it is necessary to have high-quality content and properly optimized sites to start with.
Working full time from home, I am interested in blogging, online marketing, financial topics and technology. My aim is to constantly build my knowledge of affiliate marketing and related topics while help others in the process by creating online resources that enlighten and inform.