LinkedIn – Michelle's E-Marketing Blog

Social Sites: The Good and The Bad

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?

Word of Mouth: Who Do You Trust?

Word of mouth is widely regarded as one of the most valuable, and often hardest to do well, forms of marketing. In order to be successful at word of mouth marketing it is important to consider which recommendations are deemed most credible by consumers. Not surprisingly, over the years the human element has remained key in creating trust. As the use of social networks like Facebook increases around the world, this human element can be conveyed through an online medium. The supporting findings below have important implications for marketers. Rather than allocating dollars to radio or TV advertisements, in many situations it may be more effective to create online content which can then be tweeted, posted on a blog, or linked to on Facebook by a consumer. A friend who sees this content is more likely to trust it than if it were presented to them by a business with a motive.

This information shows how lucrative it can be for firms to identify those influential people out there on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. and harness them to spread the relevant buzz. Prompt your fans to talk about your brand ex. “Today we launched _____ product, tell us what you think about it!”. Or offer them discounts and deals that they can then spread the word about. Ideally you ultimately create customer evangelists who advocate the brand at no cost!

Reference: Who Gives the Most Trusted Recommendations?