Atlanta Small Business Marketing Consulting

What is Social Networking?

It wasn't long ago that the only reliable way to find information online was to use a search engine like Google.

However, times are quickly changing. With the birth of what we call Web 2.0 (interactive, dynamic websites that promote or operate as social networks), people can now easily find information and websites that other human beings recommend.

One example of this is social bookmarking. Websites like Del.icio.us, Digg, and Furl allow users to share their personal favorites (bookmarks) with others. Users tag each bookmarked website with the keywords they feel are most applicable.

What is the benefit of this?

Now, instead of simply using a search engine to find information, people can search tags that will display all websites bookmarked with that specific tag. This amounts to a human referral or popularity vote for the website and its relevance to the subject being searched.

Sometimes social networking sites include blogging social networks. An example of this would be Technorati.com. Technorati indexes blogs based on the amount of incoming links those blogs have, as well as the tags associated with their posts.

But the most popular social network by far is MySpace. Despite the fact that over 20 million unique visitors every month, few businesses or website owners have thought to take advantage of this incredible resource.

Lastly, two powerful new social media networks have emerged that are revolutionizing audio and video: YouTube and BlogTalkRadio. These powerful networks allow every day people like you and I to submit video & audio clips to share with the world and spread the word about what matters most to them.

Few businesses realize it yet, but these media networks are potential goldmines stock full of future Speilbergs, Bloombergs, and Oprahs - all potential broadcasters of your marketing message.

What kind of impact could that have on your business?

How Will Social Networking Help My Site Traffic Grow?

Did you know that 2 out of 3 people online in June 2006 visited a social networking site. In fact, today 1 out of every 20 website visits is to a social networking website. Experts even say that social networks are starting to steal traffic from the major search engines Yahoo! and Google.

What does that mean to you?

Simply this...that if your company is not involved on any of the major social networks, you're missing out on the easiest, fastest way to access 67% of internet users.

How Do I Get Involved in Social Networking?

Working with social sites is similar to working with the media. Give them a good enough story, secret, tip, or resource that they can sink their teeth into and you’ll have an army of talkers spreading the word about you and your business.

Think of them as an army of unpaid salesmen talking about your business or product, and ready to send thousands of curious people over to your website to learn more.

And this translates into warm referrals, which convert into sales on an average of 667% better than cold leads (search engine results). So even if you reach less people through social networking, your conversions will be far higher.

We target various social networks through a variety of methods:

Article or Blog Promotion

We manage several blogs for our various clients (as well as article pages) that contain posts written purely to capture the imagination and interest of our client’s target market.

For example, if you sell either a service or products, we will develop a series of blog posts or articles that discuss a controversial or “hot off the press” topic that potential clients for your industry will find either highly valuable as an information resource, highly intriguing or emotionally stimulating. Our job then is to promote it to various social bookmarking and blogging networks, as well as popular bloggers – who will then circulate the story and generate traffic back to your website.

Social Promotion

Particularly effective for clients who target teens, young adults, musicians, or other highly active social groups, we implement social promotion campaigns on networks like MySpace, FaceBook, Catch27, and CraigsList to spread the word about your business. Even if your business does not target the “myspace crowd,” we can almost always devise a creative campaign to get the net buzzing.

How Does Social Networking Work With SEO?

Remember we discussed earlier that social networking sites are beginning to eclipse traffic from the major search engines. So, as more and more internet users begin to use tags to find information (a tag is a keyword that a human associated with a website, vs. a keyword that a search engine attributes to a website), Search Marketing professionals cannot ignore the growing dominance of the social networks.

However, we look at this as a balanced partnership between social networks and search engines. Remember that social networking gets you in front of people who no longer use search engines because they are finding their information through bookmarks or tags.

Now here is the best part.

While your website grows in popularity with social networks like Digg and MySpace, your natural organic search rankings will continue to increase as a result!

Why?

Because your popularity tells Google that you are an authority in your market according to what your human audience has to say.

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