It seems that anyone who is anyone these days has a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and the various other social networking sites. Many of the assiduously update their status’ and tweet and post about all sorts of stuff to do with their business, but is all this effort really worthwhile? Sure you can build up a large, and if you are smart, loyal following of many thousands of people. You can make your brand recognizable around the World to internet users everywhere, but what proportion of those people following you have any interest in what you actually do as a business? In percentage terms, how many customers are you going to find through social networking? The argument has always been that this is not the point. The point of social networking is to drive traffic to your site because more traffic equates to more ranking points on the search engines, but even this is questionable. Yes, search engines like sites with lots of traffic, but if you look at the algorithm carefully you’ll see that they also like sites that get genuine traffic, i.e. traffic that stays on your site for a few minutes and maybe clicks a couple of pages.
Search engine algorithm programmers are not stupid. They know that there are all sorts of ways of getting people to bounce through your site registering as hits. They also know how to spot the ones that have no relevance to your sites real purpose and they modify your rank score accordingly. It is an update to the old backlinking story. It used to be a game of who could get the most backlinks from high ranking sites to their own site. Then the search engines twigged that a brand new site that suddenly appeared with sixty thousand live backlinks probably hadn’t developed them in an ethical and organic fashion. They had almost certainly bought them from one of the many backlink farms that had been set up to boost websites. This was broadly considered to be a little bit iffy by the search engines and the algorithms were modified so that this type of unethical practice no longer paid the dividends it had. Exactly the same is true of social network driven traffic.
Now, don’t get me wrong, a well organised and targeted social networking campaign can be tremendously effective. There is a little sweet shop in Walsall that does a lt of its marketing through Facebook. Most of the people who follow their page are customers and it is great cost effective way of broadcasting new arrivals of sweets and keeping people who like to know about such things abreast of how the shop is doing. They aren’t looking for thousands of followers from across the World and consequently the Facebook page acts as a form of e-mail marketing to a properly resourced list of potential service users. It is effective and very easy to manage. You can put updates up on Facebook from a mobile phone, anytime, anywhere. Compare this to a little Balti restaurant I know. They have a couple of thousand followers on Facebook and Twitter from all over the World, the vast majority of whom, I would estimate 98.7% just based on geographical location will never go to this restaurant. In essence, whatever time they spent updating Facebook and Twitter, which they do daily, is largely wasted and could be better spend on a leaflet campaign locally as an example.
So, why all this hype around social networking? It is only my opinion, but it seems to me once again to be a way for web design companies and particularly SEO companies to get money from businesses by baffling them with technical jargon rather than by actively understanding the needs of the business and tailoring a more appropriate solution. It smacks of unethical practice, something that has been the bane of the internet ever since it became a marketing rather than an information tool. I’m quite certain this post won’t win me any friends amongst internet marketers, but come on guys, be honest…..since when did any sort of marketing have anything more than a nodding acquaintance with truth and ethics?
To any business owners reading this and considering engaging and SEO or web design company for “Social networking” just ask them the question….”How will this marketing be targeted to my specific business needs?” and if they tell you that it will drive traffic to your site follow it up by asking “What benefit does that bring?” then act according to how these questions are answered……
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