Social Networking is a Business Backfire

You just hired a web company to do your web site and they also interest you in 'enhancing' your "findability" by offering to include social networking sites as part of your marketing package. Dude, you're gonna be everywhere on the net! Alrighty then.

Someone does a web search and found your myspace, facebook, livesite (insert social network here) landing page. Hurray. Oh wait it looks childish, not all there, something just doesn't stand out. OMG who is in my friends list? The person that JUST did the search for you, returns to the search engine and trys again. What happened? Read on. (see 1)

Let’s look at another angle before I tie all this in together. You paid a SEO company (or some one) some big money to get you high rankings in search engines. This means you pay ‘x’ dollars to some firm to make sure your official web site is highly ranked. Anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month is typical. (see 2)

(1) OK when someone views a site based off of a search result, the first page they see they decide if that is what they were looking AND if it is a trustworthy site. Social networking sites are NOT trustworthy. The bad design, overly friendly under substance, branded in a box look really didn't help build that CRITICAL level of trust a web user needs from a business. More than likely, a business customer will NOT initiate contact from a social networking site first - they will attempt to find a 'better' web site - then if all else fails (i.e.; they’ve exhausted all other resources) they may come back.

TRUST is established by the web site viewer in 1/20th of a second. That is pretty dang fast. If they don't land on your official exceptionally well designed site first - guess what? You lost that chance for trust.

(2) Additionally, all that serious moola you gave a company for search engine rankings was probably based off of significant use of keywords and content relevancy to get your web site ranked. Sad thing is social networking pages do show up in searches. If your official company site statistics show a lot of traffic from social networking sites, WHY then did you pay someone for all the SEO work? For every visit from your social networking site to your official site - you lost valuable traffic information. (Your site statistics software doesn't know what keywords the user entered to get there.)

Hold on, how much traffic is coming from that social networking site? Dang the social networking site is getting more/better/different rankings than the official corporate site. You HAVE to ask yourself – why am I paying someone to keep my web site ranked when that SAME person is encouraging the use of social media? The objectives are not mutually compatible.  

Not convinced? A good business web site costs anywhere from 6-7 thousand to many tens of thousands of dollars, WHY do you want traffic on FREE social sites? Don’t you think that potential customer would be more impressed (and appreciative) with your official site?  

 

Categories: Social Networking

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11. February 2009 14:51 by Administrator2 | Comments (0) | Permalink

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About the author

I've been involved in Internet technology since the early 90's. I started by running a BBS, then FIDOnet (precursor to todays e-mail). This in turn lead me to start one of the world's first HTML based BBS with Internet technology. Prior to moving back to hometown WV in 2004, I was a developer for numerous companies, including Fortune 500 firms, dot com 'darling' companies, and AOL's public web site (non-member side) inlcuding having completed many sites for the Federal government including the EPA, FCC, NIH, and the USDA. I've worked on massive challenging sites, with a teams of developers, programmers, all for one single site and I've worked in companies where I took manula web site production from several weeks to just hours creating 2-5 new sites a week using automated tools , many with e-commerce capabilities.

Its been an exciting career for the past 15+ yrs or so. Sure, I've stepped on toes, I've hit the perverbial glass ceiling too (in a previous job),  I've seen trends come and go (heck I may have even started a few). I've made some people a lot of money, and I've seen people put their entire life into a web site. I was there at  the beginning - where were you?

I've learned to tell what works for companies and what doesn't. The internet is not one size fits all, as social networking is not for every company. Technology is not the challenge. Almost all the internet technology suitable for everyday business is off-the-shelf, the true challenge is change. Change involves education, implementation, and adaptation.