Brand your Company – One of the great benefits to the exposure that you can get through social media is the result it has on the branding of your company. Branding is key to building a success in social media in the long-term, and social media is an excellent option for helping visitors to see your company in a particular light- Get Quick Results – Building a successful website takes a considerable amount of time and effort. Search engine rankings, for instance, can take years to build in a competitive niche. On the other hand, with social media you can develop content and be seen by thousands of visitors within the same day. For this reason, social media is a great option for getting a new website or blog noticed right away.
- Social Media is Flexible -There are so many different social media websites that just about every imaginable niche is covered in one way or another. There are social news sites, bookmarking sites, and general networking sites. Whatever your needs and your audience, there should be an option to use social media for your benefit. Also, you’re not stuck to using the same social media sites over and over. If you’re not getting results in one place there’s usually other options that you can try out. Just make sure someone is monitoring the content.
- It Will Lead to Increase in Traffic – Although visitors from social media sites may be less responsive than other types of visitors, success with social media will likely increase the number of inbound links you receive. Links will boost your organic search engine rankings and they’ll also drive click-through traffic your way. Both are generally high quality traffic sources.
- Social Media Users are Predictable -The whole concept of Digg or Rating Systems wouldn’t even be possible if social media users were unpredictable. But the truth is you can usually have a good idea of what is likely to draw a response and what is not by tracking their online intelligence. With the correct Consumer Intelligence Engines in place, this will come with time, and of course the results will be much more powerful as you’re responding to your customers needs – NOT what you think they are. However, once you know a social media audience pretty well, you can cater content to their preferences with a pretty high success rate.
- Building Links with Social Media is Safer than Buying Links – If you plan to cut out the need for social media by purchasing links from other sites, you’re running the risk of being penalized or banned by Google. For some, this is a risk worth taking, but in most cases I would strongly discourage taking this chance. Personally, I focus on building links for my primary blog through the combination of content and social media and linking them naturally.
- Links Can Help Your Search Engine Rankings -Earlier I mentioned to social media can provide instant results. Well, in addition to sending loads of traffic directly, the links that result from social media success can get your new posts ranking very well with search engines almost immediately. It’s not uncommon for me to see a very respectable number of visitors from Google searches to a brand new post that just drew a lot of links through social media. While it will take a while to build search engine rankings as a whole, it is possible to create specific posts to rank well right away.
- It Allows You to Leverage Your Existing Traffic -Do you already have a solid blog with a steady flow of traffic? If so, chances are you could leverage that traffic to draw even more visitors with social media. You may want to use voting buttons on your posts or ask some of your readers and friends to give you a vote occasionally.
- Some Visitors Will Be Targeted -The biggest knock on social media traffic is that it’s not targeted, and that is typically true. However, visitors from niche social media sites can be very highly targeted, and on top of that, a portion of visitors from general news sites will be targeted as well. For example, if you get 25,000 visitors from a post on the Digg front page, maybe only 5,000 of them will have much of an interest in your site. Still, that’s a quick 5,000 visitors that you wouldn’t have had without social media. Just because a smaller percentage of the visitors will stick doesn’t mean that they are irrelevant.
- The Future of the Internet is Social – Social media and social networking aren’t going away any time soon. The major players and the types of social sites may change of the course of time, but this is a trend that online marketers need to adjust to. Without finding ways to build a website or blog through social media you could be left behind by your competitors.
This entry was posted
on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Consumer Intelligence, Marketing Strategy, Social Media.
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