{"id":45,"date":"2011-04-04T09:42:11","date_gmt":"2011-04-04T13:42:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sharpinnovations.com\/blog\/?p=45"},"modified":"2023-02-01T13:52:07","modified_gmt":"2023-02-01T18:52:07","slug":"social-networking-for-small-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sharpinnovations.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/social-networking-for-small-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Networking for Small Business"},"content":{"rendered":"

Internet Marketing through Social Networking<\/strong><\/p>\n

Social Networking has become a large part of search engine optimization (\u201cseo\u201d). And while we\u2019ve heard that it is important, it can be hard to understand how everything ties together. So let\u2019s start with your website, which can be thought of as the epicenter of information about your company. When discussing link building, we are normally talking about how we can improve search results to attract visitors to your website. The real question is, how do you get relevant visitors and traffic?<\/p>\n

The Google Farmer Update<\/strong><\/p>\n

With the new Google \u201cfarmer\/panda\u201d update, methods traditionally used to improve search have changed a bit in favor of social media. Google\u2019s update hit many traditional link-building websites hard, including article and e-zine-intensive sites. Many of these sites have been called \u201ccontent farms\u201d because they have thousands of pages of content that are not of good quality and\/or don\u2019t have content relevant to search queries. Overnight, some of these websites lost up to 90% of their traffic. But even so, article building and press releases are still a good way to get links to your website\u2014you simply have to be selective in where your articles and releases are submitted. And social networking (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), in particular, plays a significant role in this update because these sites usually have the most up-to-date content.<\/p>\n

Social Networking for Business<\/strong><\/p>\n

We often get asked, \u201cHow can Facebook help our business? I thought it was just a website to connect with old friends.\u201d Of course you can do those things with Facebook, but it can also act as means to spread information about your business faster than any traditional media could ever dream. If you\u2019ve spent time on Facebook, think about how often you see people pressing the \u201clike\u201d button and reposting other people\u2019s posts. When you \u201clike\u201d something on your friend\u2019s Facebook profile, it sends a status update to all of your friends. And if 10 of your friends end up pressing the \u201clike\u201d button, then it gets sent to all of their friends. And on and on it goes.<\/p>\n

The above situation is called the \u201cpower of ten\u201d effect. Basically, if you post something on your Facebook page and all of your friends see it, 10% of those friends will repost it, and so on. Let\u2019s say you started with 100 friends. That means if you post the original, 10 of your friends posted it again, and then 10 of their friends re-post, then ultimately over 10,000 people saw it on their status update ticker. That is the power of just one form of social networking.<\/p>\n

Twitter acts in a different way by relaying relevant information from \u201ctweets\u201d into driving traffic to your website through back-links and relevant keywords. Let\u2019s say you are a bakery and decided to showcase a new page on your website about cake decorating classes. The title of that page could be something like, \u201cNew Cake Decorating Classes in Lancaster.\u201d If you took the same keywords and put it in a Twitter post called, \u201cCheck out our new cake decorating classes in Lancaster https:\/\/www.domain.com\u201d, that would act as a relevant back-link. When Twitter is crawled by Google, you may see that your website now pops-up under the search \u201cCake decorating classes in Lancaster.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not Right for Everyone<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to get excited about social media and its impact on search and lead generation. But social networking is not right for every business. A business for example that might specialize in weddings<\/a> would be a great example of a target audience that would work. A business that has a very specialized audience may not benefit from social media as much as a business who has a larger audience (for instance, a business that sells aerospace products compared to a business that sells cell phones). It is good to assess your business structure before deciding whether or not social networking is right for you. Even if it has the benefit of potentially giving you a boost in rankings over the short term, it may be more beneficial in the long-term to work on article writing and press releases instead.<\/p>\n

Social networking websites won\u2019t be the silver bullet for all of your Internet marketing needs, but it may help gain more credibility, allow you to connect with your customers and act as an information hub to spread the word about your products or services. With so many new sites popping up in the social hemisphere, it may be time to get on the bandwagon and find out what the buzz is about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Social Networking has become a large part of search engine optimization (\u201cseo\u201d). And while we\u2019ve heard that it is important, it can be hard to understand how everything ties together…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet-marketing","category-social-media"],"yoast_head":"\nSocial Networking for Small Business - Sharp Innovations Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Social Networking has become a large part of search engine optimization (\u201cseo\u201d). 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