The short answer is, yes. Social networking offers a kind of publicity you won’t find anywhere else: free, word of mouth advertising.
If you’ve ever bought a product or gone to a restaurant on the recommendation of a friend, you’ve already seen the power of social networking in action. Sites like Facebook and Myspace take this same idea and add to it the power of the Internet. The result is that people can instantly share recommendations with hundreds of friends and family members in blink of an eye, or rather, with the click of a mouse.
There is no type of advertising that is more effective than word of mouth. The most expensive and colorful advertising campaigns can’t compete with the power of one person telling another person what to buy or where to go. But that’s not all…
Search engines like Google base their search results on more than just keywords. Of course, a good website must have strong content and keywords to be of any use, but even the most well-constructed sites need traffic.
The more traffic a site receives, the more likely it will show up in search results because Google (and others) will assume that this site has the potential to answer questions and solve problems. Search engines also give preference to sites that make use of interlinking. Imagine the Internet as a series of rooms (sites) with hallways (hyperlinks) leading to and from the rooms. The more hallways lead to a room, the more visitors the room will receive, and those visitors will discuss and hopefully recommend the room to others. In this metaphor, social networking is a source of hallways for your room.
While Facebook and Myspace were invented with the intention of keeping people connected with friends and family, they have also presented businesses (particularly small businesses) with a new way to advertise a brand or service. Research on advertising tells us that people are bombarded with upwards of 50,000 ads per day, most of which we ignore. But at the end of the day, the endorsements we remember are those of our friends and family.
One of the services our company offers is help with social networking. Building and maintaining a profile on one of these sites takes very little time and the payoff in visibility is enormous. Please contact us if you are interested in taking advantage of this service.