Social Networking: Quality vs. Quantity
Social Networks
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.