Can Social Media Replace The Need of my Website?

With social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter providing ample information about one’s business, is it possible that a company’s website may become irrelevant? Do you really have to guess how I am going to answer this? The answer is: OF COURSE NOT! SOCIAL MEDIA WILL NOT REPLACE THE NEED OF A CORPORATE WEBSITE! I answered the question a little early on but hopefully you will keep reading...

I know some of you may be sour to hear this news since your social media accounts are free (well most of them…unless you have the premium version of LinkedIn, then you might be paying a monthly fee) and websites are an investment. Think about it though, if you are looking to find out information about a company and you realize this company doesn’t have a website, how legitimate do you consider their business to be? Keep in mind that just because you have a Facebook account doesn’t mean everyone has a Facebook account!!! You don’t want to limit your audience; everyone can view your website! It is a great idea though to have links to all your social media realms on your corporate website, this way users can decide for themselves how they would like to connect with you more.

Sure, social media sites can offer quite a bit of information about your business, but who is to say Facebook and Twitter will be around forever? Right now, as I speak, we are all witnessing the dying day of MySpace. Yeah, I said it…MySpace is slowing fading away. Social Media is meant to be an added supplement to your marketing; it is another venue to advertise, just as you would send out direct mail pieces. Social media in my opinion is a really great platform for sales people; especially you sales people out there networking and schmoozing all day long! Your social media site becomes a place where people can get to know you on a little more personal level to build that trust factor and also get the chance to see that you are knowledgeable in your industry.

In closing, I do not think it is the end of the corporate website era. I do believe however that social media and a website should be combined effort and they should both be used to your company’s advantage. Social media accounts and websites both have their pros and cons but they are meant to complement each other not replace one or the other.

What is SEO and SEM? What is the difference between the two?

SEO, HTML, PHP, ASP, XHTML, SEM….the list goes on of acronyms in this industry. It can be exhausting to remember them all and keep them straight! What I want to break down for you today is SEO and SEM. These are two acronyms that you as a business owner probably hear from day to day and are confused as hell about.

We will start with SEO. The acronym SEO translates to Search Engine Optimization. It’s a mouthful (hence the acronym), say it again, Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving your “organic” search engine results. Now you are wondering what “organic” means. Look at the image below to help me better explain this:

As you can see I pointed out the organic results that came up in Google when I typed in shoes. The first three websites in the image that come up in the pink shaded box, and off to the right are considered “sponsored links,” which I will explain later. For now, we are talking about the organic results. The organic results are what the search engine finds MOST RELEVANT to what you typed in the search box. This means you will probably find EXACTLY what you were looking for in the organic results.

How do you get to be on the first page in Google for the organic results? Well, it all depends on how search engine friendly your website is. There are several elements that go into making your website more search engine friendly. First and foremost it is important to make sure your website is on a good platform (i.e. PHP or My SQL), you want your website to be database driven. If your website was built in programs that create ASP driven websites there is a good chance that no matter how much money you spend on optimizing your website, in the long run it probably just won’t hold up in search engines. Now I know I threw around a lot of terms you aren’t familiar with, we will discuss them another day, but now you at least know enough to make you dangerous.

Other tactics that make your website search engine friendly is having your Title Tags and H1 tags match, as well as having keywords and your target market in them. You can see your title tag by looking at the very top of your browser and seeing what it says, chances are it says “home (or whichever page you are on).” Your H1 tag is the first header line in the content of your website. Relative content is also very important to have within your website. Put articles into your website that has to do with your business and/or industry. I know some people think it is best to have very little text on your website because people won’t read it, which is true most people won’t sit there and read all the text on your website, but this is for the search engines to read! Also you want to increase your reciprocal link network, which has to do with the amount of websites linking back to you and those websites importance level. Those are just a few tactics...

Now that you absorbed all the information we will move on to SEM. The acronym SEM translates to Search Engine Marketing. Search engine marketing is the act of paying for your search engine listings. To clarify, that means paying for the listing itself (the ones in the sponsored links area), not paying someone to do SEO for you.

When I type in shoes, companies such as Macy’s and Zappos, pay money every time you click on one of their sponsored links, even if you don’t buy anything! Sounds kind of risky huh?! If you are a small business it is very difficult to compete with such large companies as these because, their monthly budget to spend on SEO is going to be much smaller than yours. Now this is just one example of paid marketing on the web, the one that most people are familiar with. There are other types of web marketing out there!

SEO or SEM? Which is better? Well, I think you can tell that I am a little more biased towards SEO. I think that you get a better ROI (Return on Investment). However, I will not say SEO is always the best way to go. I take that back, your website should be optimized even if you are going to do SEM. This way any money you are investing into SEM is overall helping the ranking of your website. For a small local business though, usually SEO is the best route for them. Sometimes both. Still confused? Ask away.

Social Networking – A DO or a DON’T For Your Business???

PART THREE: PROFILES, GROUPS, PAGES – WHAT THE HECK IS THE DIFFERENCE?

As you may have began to notice, I am more biased towards using Facebook as oppose to other social networking outlets. Why? Well as best put from the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckenburg, “Facebook will move away from being this website and move toward being this platform for applications and this representation of the social graph.” Although it may seem the most complicated of all the social networking sites, it is really just the most dynamic. Dynamics equals a more ingenious platform that is worth our time learning.

*Here is a mind blowing fact for you: The age group consisting of 35-54 year olds on Facebook has grown by 276%. That is a large number for a short amount of time.

So, I advised you to have two separate accounts on Facebook, one as your personal profile and one as your business profile. When I say “business profile” I do not necessarily mean a profile under your business name, but yet a profile as YOU, as a business professional. While logged into your business profile I want you to create a page. Yes, a page. To create a page, go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php . I’m sure you can follow directions on how to do so from there, if you get stuck send me a message and I will help you out.

Keeping up to date with your social media really seems like a full time job huh? (Don’t worry it will get easier once you are all caught up and get the hang of it) Especially now that I am adding more to your list! Why am I making you create a page in addition to your business profile? Well, the functionality behind these so called “Pages” is to promote your business. Having a profile seems easier because you are semi-familiar with using it but it is also good to have a “Page” for two reasons:

1. There is more functionality and tools added to the “Page” area to help you better promote your business (Yeah, and that is another conversation itself).

2. *Section 4.2 of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities states: “You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser).”

Unfortunately, this section is not elaborated on. My translation of this is, Facebook has the right to disable your profile for promoting your business. Now Facebook does not currently enforce this in anyway. Key word being currently, and when they decide to delete your profile for promoting your business don’t you want to be glad you played by the rules and also had your business “Page.” Now, I am not saying Facebook will do this or that this will happen in the near future but I just want you to know what we are dealing with here. So don’t panic, continue using your business profile, as I will too, especially while I putting together all the pieces to my “Page.”

Now here is a key difference between profiles, pages and groups. Profiles allow you to add “friends.” Pages allow you to add “fans.” Profiles limit you to having 5,000 friends while Page put no restrictions on the number of fans you can have. Lastly, groups have “members.”

Pages really are a great way to promote your business on Facebook. Another perk is that analytics are available for the page that you create.

*Information was gathered at the following websites for some of the content:

Facebook

iStrategy

Social Networking – A DO or a DON’T For Your Business???

PART TWO: WHICH SOCIAL NETWORKING SITE SHOULD I USE??

We are going to go back to the basics of marketing. In order to have any type of successful marketing campaign it is important to understand your target market. Sit down and think about it, who is your ideal client and what demographics do they fall under? Be specific! Don’t you dare say anyone and everyone can benefit from my services!

Now that you have this ideal client in mind, now ask yourself, “What is the age of this client?” Don’t worry if you’re not right on the dot. You are not going to tell them to their face how old you think they are anyways.

Secondly ask yourself, “Is my client male or female?” Yes, I understand that sometimes you may work with both male and female, but work with me here, we are talking about your IDEAL client.

Your next question: “About how much money does my client make a year?” This answer you could maybe have two answers. How much your client actually makes a year and what is the client’s household income a year.

One more question to ask yourself “What is my client’s education level?”
I’m sure your wondering why I made you answer all these questions. Well, I personally cannot sit here and tell you that you need to use Facebook over Twitter or LinkedIn over MySpace, you know your business better than I do, so you will have to decide for yourself which social networking site is best for you. Below I broke down for you some statistics and demographics of the main social networking websites. Some of you may prefer to have all of them to cover a more broad range of clients. Honestly though, running a social media campaign can really be a lot of work, and if you can focus on one or maybe two (I focus on TWO: LinkedIn and Facebook) and give it all your efforts you will most likely have more successful results.

Facebook (most statistics are as of July 2009):
More than 250 million active users
54.6% Female
Age: 18-34, 59.4%

Twitter:
26.5 million US users
53% Female
Age: 18-34, 47% 35-49, 31%
Income: 0-30k, 21% 30-60k, 28% 60-100k, 24% 100k+, 27%
No kids: 74%
Education: 46% college, 17% grad school

Myspace:
58% Female
70% Caucasian
Age: 18-34, 44%
Education: 53% have no college education

LinkedIn:
64% Male
Age: Average is 41
Income: Average is $109,703
Education: 80% College grad/post grad

I hope this helps you decide where to focus your efforts. I ultimately made my choice using LinkedIn because it is business focused and Facebook because many people I network with day in and day out use Facebook…so I must go where there are right?!

Please not this information is meant to help you with creating profiles, there are more effective ways to advertise on these websites but those would include paid ads!

*Statistics gathered at these sites:

Netmagellan

Social Media Today

Quantcast

Techcrunch

Social Networking - A Do or a Don't for Your Business???

PART ONE: YOU GOT TO KEEP THEM SEPARATED!

Okay, so I realize social networking is a very broad topic and that many of you have questions about this fairly new frontier. I plan on breaking down this social networking subject for you as I receive more feedback from you to see what exactly it is you all want to know (So please leave me comments below or send me messages on Facebook and let me know, I will be updating my blog weekly, more if needed). As you know the technology industry in consistently changing, not to make us feel old or out of date, but to better make our lives and businesses run more smoothly and efficiently. I continue to educate myself on the social media networking frenzy by attending seminars, both online and in person, as well as ongoing research on the World Wide Web and even more importantly applying these tactics myself!

One thing I have learned is that social networking can be a value to your business. However, I see many people combining their business with pleasure. Not always a bad thing, but not always a good thing either. Many people I see are killing two birds with one stone and using their Facebook profile (I will refer to Facebook because it is one I am most familiar with) for personal reasons but yet add many business prospects they come in contact with. How professional will your prospects think you are when they see photos of you doing a beer bong on the weekend or half naked pictures of yourself (No I am not making these up to be humorous, these are examples from people who want me to business with them)? Now I understand sex sells, but really let’s be classy about it. I also realize that people want to do business with other people who seem like they are fun, but how about you post pictures of you and your clients golfing or enjoying a glass of vino instead.

What is my solution you ask? You need to have TWO profiles for your social networking accounts. Yes, TWO!! One profile can be for you to connect with friends and old classmates and share enlightening photos from the weekend, the other profile will be your business profile. When I say business profile, I do not necessarily mean a profile for your actual business but one just for you, the business side of you. Especially if you are in sales. You could add photos of you and your clients, photos of you at a fancy social or a chamber event. Also, keep your clients up to date on latest news in your industry, new clients of yours, or specials you may be offering by updating your ‘status’ on Facebook. If you would like to add my business profile to your list of friends on Facebook, you can search for me by my business email, Ashley@enertiasolutions.com.

Lastly, I will leave you with one of my favorite business Facebook profiles: Sprinkles. Yes, the cupcake shop, I suggest you add them right now to your friends list. Nearly every day they will update their status with a new word that you can whisper to one of the Sprinkles employees, and they will give you a FREE cupcake! What a great idea! Let this profile inspire you!