How did MOZ handle the re-branding when it comes to the social channels and signals?

[BeytzNet]

Hi,

In continuous to my question here (doesn't let me continue the thread):
http://moz.com/community/q/how-did-the-moz-new-domain-and-branding-work

I enjoyed your descriptive post about the process but do have follow up questions:

How did you manage changing your social platforms from SEOMoz to MOZ?
As far as I know once you have more than 200 FB fans you cannot change the page's name (I currently have 17,000 and consider re-branding)

Also, I didn't quite get what you did with the social signals of the old pages?
Did you 301 the old pages to the new ones but leave the href of the social buttons pointing to the old pages?

Thanks

[EricaMcGillivray]

Hi!

My first comment on our rebrand on social from SEOmoz to Moz is to be prepared. We knew about a year before this was happening, which gave us a lot of time to make connections and make sure we had the proper assets for the switch.

Facebook: They do have a place where you can file to switch your account name if you have over 200 likes. At the time, we had an ad accounts manager, so we reached out to them that way about our rebrand. They had to do everything on their backend for us. We gave them the instructions and the time we wanted it switched and magic. Then we, of course, had to update our information and pretty graphics.

Twitter: We secured the @Moz Twitter handle probably a year or more before we actually transitioned to it. We did let Twitter know we were doing this -- only in that it might've been risk if someone was 2 seconds faster to the draw than me and we have a verified account, which the continuation of that helped secure our branding and build a trust. To keep all our followers and such, we just changed the @Moz to something different temporarily, changed @SEOmoz to @Moz, and then the original @Moz to @SEOmoz. We wanted to keep the old @SEOmoz one for branding, to keep it out of squatters' hands, and because people still tweet at us via it. The only thing Twitter really helped us about with was the re-verification once we were @Moz.

LinkedIn Groups: Simple rename in their interface.

LinkedIn Company Page: You cannot change a company page name, and our efforts to reach out to someone from LinkedIn were not fruitful. We had to start an entire new page, which meant that we lost any of the followers there that we had before. Note: If your brand is 3 characters or less, you may have trouble when you get all your employees to change their employer on their personal profiles as it won't populate in the drop-down. After a few weeks and lots of Mozzer support tickets, they came up with a solution for us.

Pinterest: You can change the name in their interface.

YouTube: We actually already had our post-rebrand name over there. You can change it, but currently, YouTube has issues if you try also to reclaim your old brand.

In the end, we only really lost followers in LinkedIn as we were able to easily rename everything else instead of create a new account there. And Ruth, our SEO, rocked the proper 301s on our site so all our old links were pointing to the proper places. And our web team changed all our social buttons to the new URLs and names.

Hope this helps you on your rebrand!

[BeytzNet]

Hello and thanks for sharing.

I still have one/two open issues...

I see that on the old pages you left the social buttons pointing to the old original seomoz pages.

Random examples:
http://moz.com/blog/image-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday   (points to seomoz)
http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change  (points to seomoz)

Why is that? Wouldn't it be better to gain new likes and shares on the new pages (after all the articles are still visited from the SERPS)?

Also, I noticed that on those old articles you did not change the internal links.
Same question, wouldn't it be better to link them to the new pages instead of an old page that redirects them?

THANKS,
Looking forward to your answers (just about to domain migrate my site)...

[EricaMcGillivray]

Any links to old SEOmoz social accounts on those pages are straight up a mistake and oversight on our part. They are not any super secret SEO formula we've found. They are not supposed to be there, and we messed up by not removing them.

That said, on those pages, I've looked for the old SEOmoz mentions and I cannot find them. Can you be more specific about where you're seeing them so I can get them fixed? Thanks!

[BeytzNet]

Hi Erica,

I apologize for the delayed reply, I just got to these steps on my own domain referral (took longer than expected)

Take the first example I posted up here:
http://moz.com/blog/image-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday

First, on the beginning of the post it links back to http://www.seomoz.org/blog/video-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday-11080, which is there redirected to moz.com equivalent page. This seems like a wasted step unless it is on purpose.

Secondly, it has lots of social shares and the number count is taken from the original MOZ posts.

Just "view source" and search for: "Get your social on" and you'll see the following:

div class="fb-like" data-href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/image-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday"

a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-counturl="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/image-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday"

div class="g-plusone" data-size="tall" data-href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/image-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday"

I wonder what it means about new shares and if this was on purpose...

Also, how did you change your Facebook name to MOZ when you have more than 200 likes...?

Thanks

[EricaMcGillivray]

Okay, in the social share buttons on old posts, we left the old URLs there because Twitter, G+, etc doesn't understand 301 redirects. We didn't want all the posts saying that 0 people had shared then, and one posts past a certain age, we don't expect to get more more. You can read more on how to do this here. 

"First, on the beginning of the post it links back to http://www.seomoz.org/blog/video-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday-11080, which is there redirected to moz.com equivalent page. This seems like a wasted step unless it is on purpose."

This is just us being LAZY. We did not do a database change for old SEOmoz.org URLs to Moz.com URLs because we were busy doing other things. We left the body of posts as they were.

I saw you made another Q&A post about your troubles with changing your FB name and have a great answer in there.

[BeytzNet]

Thanks and Happy New Year.

I must say that from my examination 301 redirects does transfer Pluses!

Since my blog is in WP I had no way (that I am aware of) for doing particular redirects and management to social channels so I did lose my facebook likes where I had dozens of likes per post which is a shame.

Thanks for all the great advises.

[EricaMcGillivray]

Happy New Year to you as well!

Good to know about 301 redirects and G+. I imagine that the rest of the networks will get there someday.

If your hosting WP on your own domain, you can upload an htaccess file and do your 301s just like any other site. I use WP for my personal blogs and have successfully done this. I also know that some SEO plug-ins like Yoast can help you do them too.

[BeytzNet]

I didn't mean that I have a problem with the redirects...

I meant that I have a problem of placing a specific url (the old url) inside the href of the Facebook like element and its default is the page it is placed in.

If you have a solution for that I'd be happy to hear it