Are You Socializing Your Business into Obscurity?
: By Mike Phillips
:
Sometimes networking as a Web professional
can feel a lot like being a politician
running for office. Plenty of travel is involved,
even if it’s browser-based, and stump speeches
need to be written and tweaked ever so
slightly to fit the audience. Then they need to
be delivered. Drop a link here, submit a press
release there, and try to make a few hundred
friends along the way.
Like any successful political campaign,
effective networking takes time — lots and
lots of time. As any social marketing expert
will tell you, participation is required to be
truly successful. And once you realize how
much time it really takes, you might wonder
how in the world wide Web you’re going to
find all that time.
If you’ve made some inroads into the
popular social networks of the day, you know
what it’s like to spend hours looking for the
right connections; those who will help you
gain exposure to the “in’s” of the particular
portal. Or, like many, you might find that
you’ve already spent considerable time trying
to make friends, only to see the fruits of your
labor reduced to a junk mail folder filled with
unwanted email every time someone wants
you to vote on their story. All the while, your
business is suffering.
The truth is most of these networks provide
a disproportionate amount of value to
the time spent pounding the virtual pavement.
It’s time to take a long, hard look at
your networking objectives and determine if
it’s getting in the way of your business goals.
That includes sifting through your analytics
and looking at conversion rates, time-onsite,
bounce rates, exit rates and more, for the
traffic coming from these sites.
Another truth is that many of these networks
will fade into obscurity within months
or years. At that time, so will most of your
hard-earned connections. However, just like
a politician needs to carry vital swing states
during a campaign, the Web professional
needs to have a real presence in some of the
Web’s biggest networks. The two with
arguably the widest reach and greatest
momentum are currently Facebook and
Twitter, respectively. According to Facebook’s
press page, the network has more than 175
million active users and more than 3 billion
minutes are spent on the network each day
worldwide. Twitter is growing at an astronomical
rate, nearly doubling its traffic from
January to February alone, now with more
than 8 million unique page views per month.
Experienced politicians know there are
some states they just can’t win. So, their
efforts are scaled back greatly to conserve
their energy for the important battlegrounds.
It’s no different for the Web professional.
Reports regularly surface about how some
social networks are “gamed,” benefiting only
those who know how to work the system to
their benefit. Let them keep their game. Your
game is your business, and you play for
keeps.
If you focus on your business objectives,
your products and your services, the crowd
will follow. In fact, there’s no better way to
gain exposure on a network than letting
someone else do it for you. Let the voracious
social networkers submit your content and
get their friends to vote it up for you. What’s
important is that they can find it. Chances
are, if they can find it, so can the search
engines. And that’s even more important.
If you decide that social networking is a
must for your business, make your presence
where you stand to reap the greatest rewards.
If you’re not tech-specific, skip Sphinn. If
you don’t cater to the younger crowd, take a
pass on MySpace.
Social networks are notorious time-sinks.
You need to have a presence out there, but it’s
more important to focus on your company.
After all, if your business falls behind or
worse, fails, nobody is going to want to be
friends with you anyway.


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