How Much Time Should I Spend On Social Networking?

Back to Basics: Quality and Word-of-Mouth Advertising

As a business owner, you can benefit by harnessing the power of networking sites, but you must employ extremely subtle strategies. According to David Meerman Scott, marketing strategist and author, “The online community at social networking sites hates overt commercial messages.” (See The New Rules of Marketing and PR, p. 229.)

Before diving into the details of actively using social networking for marketing purposes, however, considerable time must be spent focusing on your business itself.

• First, you must make sure your have good quality products and excellent customer service, not just lip service, empty promises, and hype.
• Second, you must make sure your website is artistic, professional, and effective—meaning it contains well-written, substantive content that is presented in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Why? People talk.

There are over 200 million members on Facebook, while MySpace has about 100 million. Many of these are asking each other for product recommendations, directly or indirectly. If your product or service measures up, they will speak highly of you. If they go to your website and like what they see, the will bookmark you. Either way, you benefit.

A recent study shows that women are turning to social networking for fun, entertainment, and to connect with friends at a higher rate than ever before, and they are twice as likely to turn to blogs verses social networking to get product recommendations. (See Social Media Optimization.)

If your products or services don't cut the mustard, look out, because, according to Mike Grehan, online marketing guru, the algorithms that drive search engine results are changing to include, with much more added weight—

1.) product recommendations on social networking sites and blogs for your products or services, and
2.) bookmarks placed by unique visitors to your website.

Thus, the days of key word manipulation to get to the top of the list of search results are going by the wayside. Soon, it will be your good products and services that get you there, not just your good use of key words. (See Mike's Is There a Link Between Search and Social? article, pp. 12-13.)


Time Well Spent

Knowing this, you can see that your efforts to use social networking as an avenue to promote your brand and your business is crucial to long-term growth. The key to success is to experiment! Try placing videos on YouTube, inserting interesting articles into your Blog, creating profiles on MySpace, and establishing Groups on Facebook—and see what happens. You might find the next internet spokesperson star is sitting inside the walls of your own company!

You can track your hits easily by employing the technology at www.bit.ly, where you can enter web addresses (say, your YouTube video, for instance) and see how many people are stopping by to see it. Spending time to measure and analyze results is the only way to see if your efforts are paying off. It will take some time to find the right niche or angle for your business, so dedicate enough time and resources to see the effort through. Don't cut things off prematurely.

Also, it's important to update your material frequently, even daily. Since web users want the latest information available on the subject they are searching for, search engines in turn look for the freshest material online. By changing your content, you can insure optimal results in search engine rankings. (See Content Optimization.) This of course will require a committed and dedicated staff to manage, and the unflinching support of the organization behind them.

For more tips on optimizing your web presence and harnessing the power of social networking sites, contact the professionals at HIT Web Design.