The Quisenblog

So which Social Media platforms are most worth your time?

That’s a question a lot of us in marketing have been asking for the past few years. There seems to be no shortage of ways for brands and marketers to get involved in Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogging, etc. Some require just a few minutes a day to keep up to speed. Others significantly more. But which platforms do users find most engaging, and which have the higher likelihood of leading to creating a new customer or sale?

We’re learning more and more about how people interact with Social Media all the time. And recently, the folks at Marketing Sherpa created a graph that took into consideration potential engagement versus the amount of time required to keep up.

The graph, show here, predictably shows that the easiest Social Media ventures to take part in (social buttons on your website or emails, for example) also drive the lowest engagement. And that those that require the most time (managing Search Engine Optimization and building relationships with noted bloggers) generally drive the most engagement.

The one platform that seems to give marketers the “most bang for the buck,” at least according to this study, is the practice of blogging. Weighing the time required to blog versus the potential payback seems to be time well spent.

Now before you jump over to Wordpress to set about creating your own blog, a word of caution. In our experience, it’s never as simple as saying “do this in Social Media and you’ll be a hit.” That’s because consumers don’t care about platforms. They care about content. Is what you’re putting out there for them (regardless of which platform you use) relevant, interesting and useful? If so, your content likely be found and passed around. If not, it doesn’t matter where the heck you put it.

Our experience has shown that the Social Media our clients are most comfortable with are usually the ones to drive engagement. For some, it’s a strong Facebook presence. For others, YouTube is the 800-lbs. gorilla. For me personally, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of Twitter and (of course) the Quisenblog. Just depends on what you’re most comfortable using.

While I’m thankful to Marketing Sherpa for taking time to plot this stuff, I myself take it with a grain of salt. For me, it’s not so simple as picking winners and losers. It’s about finding what works best for each marketer, then sticking with it.

If you’re interested in reading more about this study, here’s a link.

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Mickey New Media, On Clients, On Customers, Research, Social Media, customer experience marketing sherpa, social media best practices, social media research, social media success

This week’s social media blog posts:
Monday: The two kinds of online consumers.
Tuesday: Creating a Community, Part 1.
Wednesday: Creating a Community, Part 2.
Thursday: Social Media you can own.
Friday: Giving up control.

(This is the eighth in our series of Social Media posts for the month of October. We look forward to your feedback on this series.)

In some cases, people use the Internet to look for specific information. They have specific problems for which they are looking for a specific solution. In such cases, they are using the Internet much like a directory. They know the company or product or category they are looking for, they just need an interface to connect them. In these cases, customers are searching specifically for you (or someone like you). Obviously, with more than 9 billion (yes, billion with a “b”) web pages indexed by Google alone, you want to make yourself easy to find when people are looking for you. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is key in helping those who are looking for you find you online.

Think of SEO as advertising your site to search engines. For example, if someone is looking for a BMW dealer in Seattle to service his 540, he can enter “bmw repair seattle” into his search engine box and get a list of dealers in his service area. In the case of these dealers, the key consideration is to make sure their sites are optimized and indexed against a few key words.

SEO is an important element of your Social Media strategy, just as having your phone number listed in the Yellow Pages is key to helping would-be customers locate you. But for too many marketers SEO represents the entirety of their Social Media strategy. “If we’re easy to find when our customers are looking for us,” the thinking goes, “that represents success in Social Media.”

In truth, many of the most important elements of Social Media that can amplify success exist beyond SEO.

That’s because while some Internet users know exactly what they’re looking for, many others do not. Or rather, they have a general idea of what they are looking for, but are willing to consider a broader array of options. An example would be a hostess who has a dinner party coming up, and is looking for a creative menu to prepare. Or, a college student looking for the best deal on used course text books. They know generally what their solution “looks like,” but they’re open to do some exploring in order to find the most relevant solution. To attract this category of Internet users, using Social Media offers an abundance of opportunities well beyond SEO.

As we’ve noted throughout this series, we define Social Media as anything you do in the online space that allows others to converse, contribute, add to, give feedback to or distribute.

At its most elementary, Social Media gives you a lot more places to redirect the content you already have. You can post commercials and how-to videos on YouTube. Send P.R. releases to industry news sites. List bios of key personnel on LinkedIn or other professional sites. Index White Papers or industry research on your web site. Have executives start a blog, or contribute to highly-read industry blogs. And often when you contribute something to an existing social network, you’ll have the opportunity to include “meta tags,” which are cues used by search engines for indexing purposes to help find relevant content for online searches.

In other words, simply by participating in various Social Media platforms, you’ve vastly improved the likelihood that visitors will find you.

So while your web site is an important element to your Social Marketing program, and optimizing that site gives you a distinct advantage, utilizing other Social Marketing platforms gives you more portals through which to attract visitors and expose them to your brand.

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Mickey Social Media Google, meta tags, redirect existing content, SEO, social media success