Recent announcement of licensing deals between social media sites Facebook and Twitter and search engines Bing and Google took the online marketing world by storm…indexing and ranking public data on these social networking sties means a new avenue to organically grow your rankings.
These two forms of online marketing are no longer mutually exclusive from one another.
A lot of online marketing firms will urge you to create a Facebook profile or start a Twitter account for your small business. However, you need to stop and ask yourself why. Are they simply trying these as tactics to get an angle in the search engines?
As we’ve discussed here before and what any honest SEO will tell you, unique and valuable content is required for social media to be a successful marketing vehicle. High search engine rankings may be a short-term benefit (if you manage to get there) of simple keyword-rich content.
This won’t matter too much – in the long-term, online shoppers will look at your products and services as simply another sales pitch they’ve heard a 1000 times.
What makes content valuable? That’s for your audience to decide. Their needs and pain points may not be the same as yours so that’s why it’s important to diligently research your target audience. Ultimately, they have to decide if your product will solve their problem.
And content isn’t just text…videos, audio/podcasts and even graphics that show the user how to use your product and how it works is helpful too.
Consumers who use social media are much more discerning than traditional avenues…traditional advertising practices simply won’t work. Content needs to have value to the reader if there’s any hope you will close sales. Take some time to listen and research social media communities to see what your target audience is thinking before investing a lot of time in creating content.
And you will know pretty quick if your audience finds what you have is useful to them or not.