Reports say that the average time spent on social networking sites in the United States is over 6 hours in 1 month with over 140 million unique visitors (http://www.nielsen.com/). Companies of all sizes want to take advantage of the amount of traffic on these sites.
But with the number of social sites growing at a fast pace, how should a company approach their social networking strategy? Should a company try to make a profile on every single site in hopes of attracting some from each, or put the focus on the most popular sites and optimize their profiles there?
Let’s compare the two choices. For the quantity approach, while the traffic going to a company’s profile per site may be low, the fact that one could have lots of profiles spread out means that the traffic could match those who only have a few profiles. But is that traffic really worth it?
The quality of these profiles might not match what one could do when focused, and therefore might not attract the right kind of consumer. People may think one is only doing half the work to keep their profile up to date and might not give the traffic any reason to follow the link to the site.
Now, as for the quality approach, traffic might really enjoy coming to one’s profile page and actually read the content that is posted. The conversion rate might be higher due to the professionalism of one’s page. Optimizing for those popular sites would also prove useful as any visitors to one’s page might reference it to their friends. Those references will not happen on the quantity approach.
The major difference that can be seen between these two approaches is the kind of traffic that will be driven to a site. Through the quantity approach, a lot of random traffic may be driven to a company’s site, but what will the bounce rate be of that traffic, or how many people will actually stay? Due to quality of one’s profile, relevant traffic will be pushed to a company’s site, almost guaranteeing a lower bounce rate. Any company should see an improvement if the time it takes to build profiles on other sites is put towards optimizing the profile on the most popular site.
Google recently released their new product, Google Buzz. Buzz can be compared to other social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Here is a video that shows what Buzz is capable of doing.
So what does this mean from a search and marketing perspective for businesses? Well, most will treat it similar to Facebook and Twitter where they will be sending out business information and updates to consumers. They will be able to follow their customers and competitors alike, just like in other social media sites.
But it can open up other possibilities that those other sites might not be capable of doing. The quickness of responses from other people in your network would be much higher than that of Facebook, even though they are both in real time. Google Buzz is based on Gmail, and if people get involved with Buzz on the business side, they would never leave their email all day, considering that anything posted on Buzz would show up in your inbox if it is important. Facebook is more of a check and leave type social media. People there go on every once in a while to check updates, etc, and then leave.
On the search side of things, Buzz may offer more than what can be shown on other media sites. Buzz updates could be integrated with social search, which can be very important for the business uses of social media. When a customer does a Google search, and they are connected to a business that is part of their social circle, anything relevant from the business will be shown up near the top of their search results.
It would be interesting to see if this feature would extend outside the first degree of contacts in the customer’s social circle. For example, if a customer’s friend did the same search, would they see the same results due to the business being two degrees of separation away? This could open up many possibilities and would make connections in Buzz that much more important for businesses.
As computer and internet technology start taking shape in the form of cell phones, marketing through those means could take a different role in the future. As smart phones become completely mainstream, advertisers can see the mobile market as a medium to get brand names out. What does this mean for optimization?
As of now, optimization is clearly favored towards search engines. Having that organic traffic to a website is virtually irreplaceable. A website that is optimized for a search engine can see exponential growth in traffic and can mean increase sales in products, if the site is part of e-commerce. Right now, not having a website provides a business with no possible way to grow and increase sales, as there is zero traffic unless that business has a television commercial. They can’t even have advertisements posted on the web due to the fact that the ad wouldn’t be able to lead the potential customer to the correct place.
Thousands of Apps
In the future, as people become ever so reliant on their mobile phones, a trend might form where optimization may shift towards mobile apps. These work similarly to sites as users will search for an app using keywords; those keywords need to be tagged by the mobile app in order to have any visibility. The comparison right now between websites and mobile apps is that the number of websites greatly exceeds the number of apps (the difference is probably inconceivable). The amount of apps available across all platforms of cell phones might not even reach 1 million. Currently, keyword optimization for apps can be successful. As the market begins to be flooded with countless apps just as what happened with websites, optimization for apps might shift to what search engine optimization is like today.
Just with websites, moving to a new media sooner can mean a greater chance that your business will be found. Creating a professional app in the future may be just as important as creating a professional website with a great design, the two of which could go hand-in-hand.
