SEO and mistakes on the Social Media Sites
As social media sites continue their growth, the importance search engine marketing on them grows as well. For many business owners the ease of setting up accounts and profiles leads to the impression that marketing to the millions of visitors to those sites is easy as well. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. The nature of the web and these sites is that once a mistake is made, undoing it can require a lot of humility, work, and effort, if it can be undone at all. As with much of search engine optimization, the key is to avoid making mistakes in the first place. Here is what to avoid:
* Spamming – This is perhaps the quickest way to alienate your followers and become a non-factor in social media. Pushing a sales agenda on sites where the primary activity is for social purposes simply won’t work. Communications should instead be conversational with intent to become a valued member of the community.
* Ignoring negative feedback and/or commentary – The advantage of social media sites is that they provide a great opportunity to communicate with a targeted audience. Failure to communicate should things go wrong won’t make them go away; it will probably make them bigger. Be sure to either monitor these conversations yourself or have your SEO company do it for you so that you can respond as quickly as possible.
* Being the “point man” for your site, even if your uncomfortable with it – If you’re not comfortable with, or have time for, regular communication on your social media sites have someone else do it. Depending on how things are going, this can be a full time job by itself. Having an SEO consultant provide that work instead can ensure that communications are prompt and framed properly.
* Set your pages and profile up in a haphazard manner – Remember, this is essentially an online storefront for your business. You would set up a physical location that looked like a hurricane just hit it so don’t do it with the social media sites. Like your physical location, your online visitors will be judging your business by the quality of its appearance and its presentation.
* Let your site get stale – Even if things are cruising along nicely, be sure to update your social media pages regularly. Just like SEO for your website, fresh content will keep your audience coming back, hopefully bringing their friends and followers with them.
Social media sites afford a fantastic opportunity for businesses to develop a following, brand their products and services and, communicate with existing and potential customers. To see how your business could benefit from the traffic generated from the growing audiences at social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, call The Gervais Group today at (770) 529 2262.
