Its a question that prompts answers that could not be more polarized. Some say that time spent cultivating relationships through social media is wasted, whereas others see it as “engaging” with your potential customers.
What do I think? well it depends on who you are. To some businesses, social media is simply a waste of time. For instance, I have a client who is a solicitor specialising in road traffic offenses. His clients come looking for him on Google normally within hours of getting arrested. I can’t imagine any one of them would have bothered looking him up before hand, just in case.
However, I have hotel, coffee shops, boutique online stores that have customers that depend on their customers spreading the word and coming back to buy again. For these businesses social media is the most important new marketing tool of the last ten years.
Recently, both Google and Microsoft have both signed deals that allow them real time access to Twitters tweet feed. Both have now gone public and said that the more followers a person has the higher their tweets will rank in the search results as reported in webpro news.
This will be music to the ears of optimisers across the world who have been worried recently about the changes Google have been making to ensure that results are more personalised. Over the last few years I have seen my results become heavily biased by my previous search history, making the tracking of my seo work very difficult.
I have recently spent some time following a few more people on Twitter and the strangest thing happened. The more people I followed the more people followed me. Now, I’m not saying that’s the only thing I needed to do. I added my website, and blog so that people could see I wasn’t a spammer and I only chose to follow people who had relevant experience or businesses who I thought I could learn from. However, I couldn’t help thinking that this was just a little bit to easy.
My question is this. Is it time to abandon any attempt to get your website ranked and instead use links in social media applications such twitter, facebook, linkedin, digg, delicious, and PRweb, who lets be honest have a much better chance of getting ranked on the search engines, and ultimately get your message across faster and to more people?
There is definately an argument that says the next time you have time to update you site, you may be better off adding a few hundred new people to your “I’m following” list. It seems reciprocity is all the rage.
I bet I’m not the first person to admit to neglecting his website. I was going to say, I visit loads of businesses…but to be honest I don’t really, but the ones I do visit seem to all have the same problem. They never update their website.
Why? Well there’s a variety of reasons, but mostly it’s time, and the fact that most people don’t know how to.
Content Management Systems are supposed to make it easy to keep your website up to date but to be honest they don’t provide either of the two most vital things required. One being time, and two being inspiration.
So, what can you do when you know that every day that goes by your little site is slowly falling down the search engine rankings because you can’t think of what to update it with.
Well, here are a few ideas.
1. Talk about someone else. Find something that’s really bugged you recently, that appalling bloke from The British Nazzi Party, The England football/cricket/rugby team, shop assistants, Mcdonalds’ incredibly inconsistent coffee, Saturday night television, why you can’t find anything on Google these days, and I could go on. And have a rant! OK its better if its relevant but its a start.
2. Do a top ten things that…….
3. Do a how to….
4. Write a review about something you bought
5. Get someone else to write something. There are plenty of people out there who are excellent blog ghost writers.
Whatever you do don’t give up, your website is not going away and its your front window.
