Are Social Tools Worth It?
Pros: A lot of people don’t get Twitter… I’m one of them. Twitter has shown to have marketing potential for a business if it gets the right audience. An advantage of Twitter is that you can monitor how your brand and competitors are perceived by tracking keywords with add-on software like TweetDeck. You can add twitter feeds into your site, and it gives your business a simple way of increasing your brand exposure.
Cons: Twitter is still a fledgling platform and did have a rough time of outages last year. It does seem that only a tech-savvy fanbase is bothering with it. It can work against you too if you irritate people with meaningless tweets. It doesn’t work wonders for SEO, but if people are mentioning your brand, it will turn up in search.
Pros: The appeal of Facebook is the privacy if offers and how much more personalised content can be. Creating this is very easy, and incorporating your brand into it is simple, provided you phrase it in a simple and personal way. It’s also geared towards viral awareness. If someone becomes a fan of your brand page, all of their friends knows about it. The stronger your presence within a group, the more click throughs you’ll win.
Cons: It has little to no effect on your SEO, and convincing users to link through to your site is easier said than done. It’s more of a brand presence than a link-driving machine.
YouTube
Pros: YouTube is one of the stronger social media players. Video is becoming more and more popular as a form of communicating online, and is the best way to engage customers and address their interests re: your business. Having a branded YouTube channel filled with video content addressing customers about your products can be an invaluable marketing proposition. Videos rate rather well in search.
Cons: Not many, aside from video production costs. It should be said that YouTube isn’t fantastic for generating traffic to your site.
Social news
Pros: This type of service places its emphasis on the content sharing that Facebook features. Users post a news item and it is upvoted/downvoted by other users. Potentially, this kind of platform is useful for gaining exposure for any brand-focused blog articles/press you want to promote. Ensure that the articles you upload aren’t too advertisement-like; and that they have a novel/interesting angle to appeal to the demographic on these sites. Popular social news sites include Reddit and Digg.
Cons: Users of these sites can be very cliquey and judgemental, and often only really use the sites for entertainment. If you push your links too hard you will be down-voted and exiled, a kind of negative online exposure that is undesirable for any brand.
Tags: facebook, social, social media, social tools, twitter
