As the Web has become a more socially accessible environment, the amount of user participation on many sites continues to increase tremendously as time goes on. What started out as simple guest books and various forms of chat and messaging is now a staple feature on almost any site concerned with traffic, authority, and audience engagement. From there it’s immediately clear that the aims of social media intersect squarely with those of online marketing, and that one’s involvement in both endeavors needs to be genuine in order to survive and flourish.
When attempting to promote a website or business within the social environments on the internet, it helps to remember that there is something like a price to pay if the effort is to be at all effective in actually growing a business in some way, especially over the long term. A nicely Beatle-esque version of the rule goes something like: The commercial love you take is equal to the time for participation you make. That is, you only attract potential customers in the form of traffic if there’s something compelling enough in your profile or public activity to draw them there. Even if the “person” on the site is a fabrication, the participation can still be amusing, useful, or informative and every effort should be made to ensure that it always is.
Aside from frequent and relevant activity, it’s also important to be certain and brand the company in question thoroughly and, if multiple sites are involved, consistently between them all. Since it’s technically supposed to be just one person participating on each site, it also serves the effort well to brand that person as an authority along with the company. Ideally it would be a real person who actually is an expert in the industry or field but regardless, social participation presents an opportunity for proactive reputation management for an entire organization. So, by all means be socially active in whatever communities seem like the most appropriate fits for one’s business, but in that effort be sure to create complete and branded profiles to encourage a worthwhile end result.
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Tags: Branding, Profile, Social Media
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
