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Without contest Facebook is the ruling giant in the land of social media. In fact, comScore Inc. recently did some research in the US to see exactly how Americans spent their time online with astonishing results. According to comScore Inc. the average US Web surfer spends more time socializing on Facebook then searching on Google!
Now for those of us working in the online world this study holds great importance because it completely affects the purpose and position of online marketing. As business owner you can no longer ignore social media as part of your action plan to drive more traffic to your website in order to build a brand name for your company, gain consumer loyalty and essentially ensure ROI growth. Apart from these factors, social media is also a low-cost promotional method that will give you direct and easy access large number of online visitors, i.e. potential clients.
In December 2009 Google launched their “real-time search” which allowed the indexing of information as they were happening on the web. This included their collaboration with Facebook updates, Twitter feeds, Blog posts, Google News feeds, Yahoo! Answers and last but not least, MySpace feeds, thus allowing Google users to get the latest results on various “Hot Topics”. The main reason why this change was introduced was for the obvious reason that social media is a rich source of information. More than that is how it allows businesses to tap into the opinions and insights of online users, thus giving you an edge when it comes to online marketing. But first, let’s look at the leading social media websites and networks out there:
As stated before Facebook has rapidly grown into the leading social networking site the world has ever seen and causing many ripple effects along the way. While MySpace holds onto a meagre 5.0% of the market share, Facebook controls approximately 24%, which is more than double the amount of its closest competitor in the form of emails (11.1%), thus making it the main place users go to to share content. The key factor though is how easy Facebook makes it for you to promote your company whilst connecting with users in a personal and trustworthy manner.
When you eventually come to the realisation that no online business strategy is complete without a Facebook fan page, then consider your options of how you should go about doing so. You can either do it yourself (which requires a keen knowledge of HTML) OR you can call in the professionals to create a killer fan page for you to include such things as a fabulous design to suit your branding, and Blog feeding into your fan page. Of course the simplest thing to do is give us a call and we can help you with the whole package that includes both search engine (SEO) and social media optimization.
Then there are the demographics. Facebook allows you to advertise to a very specific market. This means that you are able to choose whether your ad should be shown to male or female, old or young, single or married Facebook users. But you can be even more particular than this. Looking for users who, for example, show some interest in pets? No problem. Facebook will be able to pin down and advertise to users that used or referenced specific details, like a love of their beloved dog Rover, allowing you to directly get in touch with your target market.
This free social networking and microblogging website is, aside from Facebook, a hot favourite amongst internet users. In 2009 Nielsen reported that this social media platform attracted 21million unique visitors giving it a near 2000% increase year-over-year. With an average of up to 370,000 new users signing up daily, Twitter made it public that they plan to redesign the website so that their millions of users may find it easier to search and navigate.
A lot of Twitter followers access their account by way of text messages, mobile phone- and desktop applications. In hindsight this means that the number of Twitter users is actually higher. For business owners it provides the chance to build and sustain relationships with their existing clientele as well as reach new potentials.
The drawing attraction of Twitter is that things are kept short and sweet, thus allowing users to quickly and frequently update their own messages, or tweets which are restricted to 140 characters, as well as respond to those they follow. As business owner it gives you the unique opportunity to interact and share information with your followers, thus allowing your company or brand to maintain top of mind awareness as well as establish it as a leader of opinions. Moreover, the Google spiders pick up on tweets which in turn help to drive more traffic to your website.
A Few Other Social Media Applications
Apart from Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, companies can also use YouTube to their advantage. This video sharing application draws much attention and have proven to give unknowns the time of day they wouldn’t have had otherwise; case in point Die Antwoord. This South African band was an unknown until their music video “Enter the ninja” spread like wildfire amongst online viewers and eventually got them a record deal with an American record company. You can easily integrate it as part of your online marketing strategy by uploading optimized videos about your product or service, thus allowing your consumers to have a quick and easy video access whilst using the SEO factor to your advantage.
Bookmarking has never been as pleasing since del.icio.us made its appearance. While links from sites such as del.icio.us aren’t really worth much from a search engine perspective – you can’t optimize like one would normally as their robots use “noarchive, nofollow, noindex” Meta tags – they do however still drive quite a bit of traffic to websites when used correctly. You can achieve this by means of tagging pages with the relevant keywords. Let’s use the example of pets again. When submitting your blog post about training your dog, be sure to post it to your del.icio.us account and tag keywords like “dog training”, “obedience training”, and “dog training tips”. Automatically these pages will have their own RSS feed which readers, such as bloggers, will tap into, as well as individuals interested in the particular topic. This not only heightens your chance for more online exposure, but also better your click-through rates, and if your content is good, the possibility that the reader will link their website with your own.
Finally, to bring our post to its conclusion, it becomes evident that social media applications hold many benefits in that they not only can, but will assure you a great online presence. Yes they will require a little more attention and effort, but if done correctly you, your brand and company will most definitely be able to reap the benefits – especially with the help of a professional online company such as iLeadOnline. So the question you should be asking yourself is not whether or not you should include social media as part of your online marketing campaign, but rather why haven’t you already?