Social Sites: The Good and The Bad
by Michelle ~ March 14th, 2011. Filed under: E-marketing.Enough of Facebook and Twitter. It’s time for a crash course on the lesser talked about social sites. Of flickr, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and Tumblr which are good or bad at improving: customer communication, brand exposure, traffic to your site, and SEO?
flickr: An image and video hosting website where community members can share and comment on media
The Good: SEO
Flickr is indexed in search engines and is also a major part of Google’s and Bing’s social search component where photos liked by individuals can be seen more prevalently in their friends’ searches.
The Bad: Traffic to Your Site
Even if tens of thousands of people see a photo with your URL below the click-through rates are terrible. Simple as that.
LinkedIn: Essentially Facebook for business professionals
The Good: Brand Exposure
Great avenue for personal branding and showing off quality of your organization. Employees should be encouraged to build complete profiles to showcase your strong team.
The Bad: Traffic to Your Site
LinkedIn is working on improving this aspect with recent updates all involving sharing; however, it isn’t as consistent as Facebook.
StumbleUpon: A social news community where members discover and share web pages
The Good: Traffic to Your Site and SEO
Traffic will come not at all or all of a sudden. And if there is traffic it will likely be in mass amounts but it’s nearly impossible to predict.
If you make it to the top of the page for a tag there is great potential for SEO as many people can find and link to you.
The Bad: Customer Communication
There is very little chance of getting a message to your current customers.
Tumblr: A social networking site where users can ask and answer questions
The Good: Customer Communication, Brand Exposure, SEO
The site is designed for customer communication and is expected to eventually rival Twitter as a communication tool as it grows.
Tumblr uses a simple platform which enables easy content sharing. If GenY is a part of your target demographic Tumblr can be a useful tool.
As it is a blog hosting platform Tumblr has high potential for link building and also ranks well in search engines.
The Bad: Traffic to Your Site
Almost all traffic happens on Tumblr itself but there is potential to expand.
Marketers should take information like this into account when deciding which social sites to focus their efforts on. These sites may all be free to use but that does not justify dedicating resources to a site which does not help achieve company goals.
Reference: Which Social Sites Are Best for Which Marketing Outcomes?