Posts Tagged ‘seo’
It’s obvious that social-media optimization has value. Sites such as MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook are all sites that no one thought would amount to anything, but they did. As social animals, people love being part of a community, and that includes an online community. The generation that has just entered the workforce and those growing up right now are Internet pros, and their parents are pretty proficient with it, too.
All of these people are involved in all kinds of activities online, from shopping and downloading music to participating in social networks. The kids are networking socially for different reasons than the parents, but both are participating.
The question then is not whether social media has value, but how much value it has. If you look at an experiment done by Marketing Experiments Journal (www<.> marketingexperiments<.>com), you can quickly appreciate that social media might be more valuable than you thought.
The experiment compared the cost and effectiveness of social-media marketing against pay-per-click advertising over the span of one year. The results? Social-media marketing cost a company $3,600 — the salary ($10 an hour) for an employee to become a part of and market to social networks. That investment drew 93,207 visitors to the site over the course of the year (which works out to be just under $.04 per visitor).
The PPC application was a little faster. Instead of having to wait weeks or months to get involved in a community, the PPC ads could be started almost immediately. The company spent $1,250 on PPC ads over the course of the year, and those ads drew 2,057 visitors to the site for a total cost of almost $.61 per visitor.
Social media had much more impact, and ultimately cost the company less money on a per-visit basis. In fact, the social-media optimization yielded a 1,578 percent better return on investment than the PPC ads did!
The value of social media is undeniable, but so are the difficulties that you may face as you try to implement a social-media-optimization effort. For example, you can’t rush headlong into a new social network and expect to be able to post your ads anywhere you want. That will get you banned from the community fairly quickly. It will also create animosity between you and the very people you’re trying to reach.
Again, you have to participate in the communities; and you can’t fake your participation. Social networkers will recognize your efforts as being disingenuous and will treat you accordingly. The only way to be effective with social-media optimization is to become a real part of the social network. If you can accomplish that, then the rewards will be better than any marketing plan you’ve used to date.