The social media marketing craze is actually beginning to penetrate the professional sector. My clients are starting to ask if it is worthwhile for their firms to get on board.
It is.
That is as long as you establish rules of engagement well before you actually become a ‘socialite’!
Let’s start at the beginning. What is a social media website?
Social Networking vs Social Bookmarketing vs The Rest provides us a with a refreshingly clear description of the three different categories that social media websites fall into:
Social Networks are groups of people who share interests and who interact in a variety of ways via software on websites. These include file-sharing, chatting, messaging, exchanging photos/video etc. Social network sites are usually free to join. Examples include Myspace, Facebook, Orkut, LinkedIn.
Social bookmarking sites like Digg, Propeller, Technorati, Reddit, del.icio.us and Stumbleupon are largely collections of users’ bookmarks sometimes organized under words/terms relevant to that page. Given sufficient bookmarking of a particular page, peer users trust its usefulness as a destination worth exploring…
User Generated Content sites include Youtube, Photobucket, Squidoo, Gather, Hubpages, Flickr, Metacafe etc. As those examples show, the UGC can be anything from articles to photos to video and audio content…
Posting an article or a profile page on any of these well ranked social media websites has the potential to deliver the following benefits to your professional firm:
- Your firm would be easier to find. The Stompernet video Social Marketing – There are NO Secrets, explains how your firm’s presence on a social media website makes it easier for searchers to find you. If you post an article or a profile page on any one of the highly ranked social media sites referenced in this article, it is likely that the page you posted will rise to the top of relevant search results efficiently. The reason? These social media websites are enormously well optimized for search engines, which means that any page you post on their site would benefit from that foundation.
- Awareness of your firm and the services you offer would increase due to two factors: the sheer volume of members of the social media sites who would be exposed to your contributions and the volume of searchers able to find your pages on social media sites through Google and other search engines. This increased awareness may however be limited in terms of how well it is aligned with the market your firm actually targets e.g. exposure may be international rather than regional.
- Your firm’s website would be less dependent on Google (and other search engines) to get listed at the top of search results. As per the first point above, the article or profile that you post on the social media site would be easy to find. However, while linked to your firm’s website, this page would not actually be your website. This means that searchers could find your website indirectly via the page you post on a social media site.
Along with the benefits of social media marketing comes risk:
- Competition for search results for your own website. The fact that these social media sites optimize so well on Google and other search engines is the reason why your presence on them would enable your firm to be more readily found. This factor can potentially become a downside once your actual website climbs the Google search results only to be 2nd, 3rd or 4th to the already well ranked page that you had previously posted on Digg, Reddit or Squidoo. A factor that can be managed by using different content on your firm website from that on the social media sites.
- Dilution of your firm’s brand image. Not all social media sites are created equally and some may not be an appropriate fit for the brand image your firm is interested in conveying. The best approach to managing this risk is to spend some time familiarizing yourself with sites like Digg, Reddit, Squidoo, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Linkedin and Facebook in order to be able to identify the ones you are comfortable associating your professional brand with.
- Dilution of your firm’s professional image. The lines between one’s professional and personal persona are thinning with the onset of social media websites. As Associated Press writer Melissa Rayworth points out with Should you ‘friend’ your boss on Facebook? Navigating the workplace perils, it is easy to lose control over your professional image on social networking sites. Her advice is to carefully consider the type of details that are appropriate to share as well as how you plan to treat your public pages differently from your private pages. She also cautions that it would be a good idea to review your pages on these social networking sites for inappropriate comments or links from friends, as they are a reflection on you.
The benefits are many for the professional firm that embarks on a social media marketing campaign, as long as its rules of engagement for doing so are established in advance. As the Stompernet video points out, social media marketing opportunities are exciting. You may be motivated to act and act now but you need to remember that you really only get one chance in this arena… plan carefully in order to be positioned to maximize it.
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