“Have you heard about the newest Internet buzzword? It’s called Social Media and depending upon who you talk about it with you’ll get a differing definition that paints it as either the next big thing or the world’s greatest waste of time. I like to think of Social Media as nothing more than a means of connecting more regularly, inexpensively and efficiently to people or businesses you might not otherwise connect to.
Perhaps you’ve heard the cliche - “people like to do business with people just like them”. The use of these various Social Media tools allow you to interact with your customers and prospects on a more personal level than ever before.
There are dozens of ways to be active online with Social Media - some of the popular tools are MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn as well as the use of blogs to self publish content. The question I hear over repeatedly from people who haven’t yet joined the online Social Media scene is - “what can I do with Social Media tools like Facebook ,etc” and “will social media help my business or is it just for high school kids”.
Rather than argue that all Social Media tools are awesome and worth spending hours of work time to use - I’ll explain how I use Social Media and what I believe its long term benefits are.
Why Social Media? It All Starts With Search
The goal most businesses have in mind when they think of “going online” is to increase the likelihood that their customers and prospects can easily find them in an online search. As you may have found, obtaining a much coveted high Google ranking is increasingly tougher as competitors employ professional search optimization consultants to craft pages tailored for higher search engine rankings. There are also some experts who predict that Google search will eventually become less dominant and give way to searches through other types of Social Media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
What can your company do when you lack the budget to hire an expensive search engine consultant and you lack the skill to do this search optimization yourself?
My answer to search optimization has been to ignore the tricks and fine tuning of web pages. These tweaks to rank a web page highly seem to change almost daily and keeping up with the latest tricks of the search trade is almost impossible unless it is your full time job. In my use of the Internet I’ve found that one type of page never seems to go out of style. Web pages that contain useful content instead of a sales pitch are increasingly prized by those customers and prospects doing their own searches on the web.
Blogging Is An Easy Way To Publish Fresh Content Online And More Helpful Content Equals More Visitors To Your Site. When people hear of blogging they sometimes think of a lone writer ranting endlessly about the local government or some other esoteric topic of interest to a small minority. At it’s core blogging means nothing more than writing an article and publishing it on the Internet.
The key to blogging is that once you write and publish an article - the words in that article become indexed by Internet search engines and eventually (hopefully soon) are discoverable by potential clients who in turn may contact you.
To be sure there are those types of blog web sites. However the way you use blogging for your company can also attract significant traffic to your web site. (Remember - more traffic reading quality articles equals the chance to contact more qualified web searchers).
During the course of a day (depending upon my schedule and whether there is any relevant news) I may publish 1 to as many as 6 articles. Do the math and you can see that by the end of the week if I published only the minimum that I’d have 5 new web pages for the search engines to index and for customers and prospects to find. Multiply that by 52 weeks in the year - and in the first year I’d have over 260 different web pages that all would be indexed and searchable on the web. There’s a good chance that out of the 260+ pages there will be some that are indexed highly by search engines - especially when I’ve taken care to make sure that I always use relevant keywords and write about topics that deliver value to clients and prospective clients.
Perhaps the best thing about blogging is that it costs nothing to start. I like to use this solution because I can update my site from any web browser without the need for added software. Once written the content is all properly formatted with graphics and fonts.
Remember - the more helpful content you have on your site (emphasis on the word helpful) the more likely a web visitor is to read it and contact you. The cost of creating this helpful content is only the time you spend writing (on average it takes me about 30 minutes to generate a typical online article including proof-reading). Once created these articles on your site live on forever.”
Article Originally posted by: Wayne Shultz
Tags: Marketing, Social Media