Blogs, and Tweets, and Keywords–oh my! Are they important? Do they work, and why? Can you tell that I am feeling poetic today? My partners and I work hard each and every day, sometimes seven days a week, researching and trying to find pertinent and clever things to blog about. Every once in a while we start to wonder if it truly makes a difference. Then we think, we have tools for that, and when we run those tools, we find out the answers: yes, it does work.
Let me give you an example. We just ran a series of reports for a prospective client. It is a travel site, and we picked another site that was similar in appearance and function to the client’s site. There were marked differences in performance between the two sites, even though–if you simply looked at and explored the two sites–they looked to be almost identical. For purposes of this post, I shall name them Site A and Site B. Site A is the prospective client, Site B was the site that most closely matched Site A in purpose and functionality.
First off, Site A was an older table-based site. Table-based sites were popular in the second iteration of Web site design, but have since fallen out of favor with many of the search engine providers. So that was hit one. The second thing we noticed is that Site A had no Blog, no Twitter, and no Facebook Business page. So while Site B was getting hits in the six-figure range, the travel site we were working with was getting about 60,000. What Site B had that Site A didn’t was Social Media.
We found that, other than the outdated-site structure, the main components driving traffic to the similar site were these:
Site A had no Blog; Site B had a blog that was being posted every three to five days
Site A had no Facebook Page; Site B had a Facebook page with information posted at regular intervals
Site A did not have a Twitter or Google-Plus presence; again, Site B had both, with regular information feeds
Time after time we see this result and it’s not just because we are a social media company. We built this company to help the Web sites that we build get great traction. The longer we are in the business, the more work we do, the better we understand how this all works.
Social Media in its most basic form is not terribly complicated; it is fairly simple and inexpensive to build a very basic WordPress blog. Setting up a Twitter account is also fairly straight-forward. The Facebook Page with its new timeline is a little more difficult, so you may want to hire us to help you with that. In fact, we can help you set up all of these things at a low cost, and train you how to support all of these social-media avenues yourself. Once we do that, you will need to use these outlets on a regular basis in order to build and maintain momentum.
www.social-cindy.com
