I attended a conference yesterday where one of the topics was, “What is Social Media?”. I have to mention up front that all the audience members were business owners or representing their business. There was a panel of 4 “experts” that, quite honestly, didn’t do the topic justice. They completely left out the most important part of social media when running a business. We will get to that in a little bit.
Their first question to the audience was to define social media. I thought this was an excellent way to open the segment. And, people in the audience rambled off all the buzzwords: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, and the rest. The second question was to define the use of social media. Almost the entire audience thought social media was nothing more than a “networking” tool!
Even worse, more people in the audience are networking via LinkedIn rather than Facebook. With 435 million subscribers on Facebook and only 65 million on LinkedIn…well, you do the math. One might argue that LinkedIn is more “professional” than Facebook. This might be a valid argument, but we still didn’t get to the 1 and only point to social media for business.
Ok, I won’t keep you waiting any longer. The ONLY reason you should be leveraging Social Media in your business plan is to drive traffic to your website! Period. You can have a thousand friends following you on Twitter, but if you’re not directing them to useful information on your website, it’s all pointless. All the social media outlets should be used and treated like the rest of your marketing material. Actually, this is the new way to market. Print media has been dead for a while. TV ads are great for Coke and Pepsi, but most companies can’t compete at that level.
It doesn’t matter where the traffic is coming from. As long as your name is out there. The larger the reach, the more traffic you drive to your website. Simple, right? LinkedIn isn’t even in the top 20 when it comes to site ranking. For site ranking, check out Alexa.
Once you leverage social media to drive traffic to your website with useful content, you will gain Page Rank on your website. Gaining page rank on your website means better results in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Bottom line is that Social Media is a powerful tool to increase your SEO efforts by driving traffic to your website. That’s it!
If you would like to setup a proactive plan to increase traffic to your website through proper Search Engine Optimization, please click on contact and reach out. There is no obligation and the benefit could easily double your leads and call volume when done correctly.
