Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

There are many articles about using social media, but I wanted to share an observation about an effect of social media, and clients finding your site.

I have been quite busy lately. One project that I have taken on is to revamp my marketing. Since social media sites play such an importance among internet users, businesses have to consider the effects of these sites on thier business. I was taking a look at one business that is doing well in its field each day for the past week. I wanted to see how they advertise with the internet, and what kind of presence they have. Since search is such of important aspect of how we interact with the web, I began my study by examining how a site shows up in the databases of different search engines, and this brought up the fact that more social media sites may need your attention.
    I began by looking at the search engine results for a given business, like “general contractors in Houston”. The first thing a user will notice is the local results in the ten-pack. Often, the firms closest to downtown seem to have a predominate position. I was interested in firms that made the first ten, but were not near downtown. If they had a website, I examined the site for any useful information. This past week found me using the seoquake tool bar to examine these sites. This is a good SEO tool for the Firefox browser. I had never used it extensively before this week, and I need to play with it more, but I enjoyed using it. This put a good deal of link information at my fingertips. With this data collection, I also looked at the results below this tenpack. Again I did not focus on the top performers. I looked at relatively new sites that made it into the fist ten results. Then I looked at some of their links to compare to the earlier one.
    This is when I noticed that user review sites and other social sites were helping these websites gain exposure. Some websites may have had little in the way of trafffic, links, or authority, but they were noticed by the search engines. Comments in forums from review sites appeared to carry a good deal of weight. Sometimes the links seem to be created by the business owners, but many came from clients. These were interesting, because negative and positive comments were treated the same. Another factor in these reviews is that many came from businesses that do business with you. For example, imagine you are a restaraunt owner. This type of business has a tendency to obtain more customer reviews than many others. However, what you may find that a supplier to that eatery posted a comment. In fact many active reviewers appear to own a firm, and they may be commenting about some related business or a firm that they have a connection to. A supplier is one example, but for related business, I can offer this example: an interior designer commenting on the products for sale at Target or Pier One.

   This is all very well and good, but why bring this up. I want you to realize that you have to consider all of your contacts as “customers”. Your employees and their families, the companies that you deal with on a regular basis, and your clients all become witnesses to your business, and they may be writing a review. This could be an avenue of marketing to pursue. Why not write a review of a company you do business with? Why not write a review of the company your spouse works for? Why not ask them to do the same for you? You may find that this kind of review can carry weight with others.Consider this:  on one blog, I have a post that is viewed twenty times a day. This post has maintained this view rate for five months now. There are only seven comments on this post. Many people view a webpage, but few write a response.
    I came away for this experiment with the fact that part of marketing success depends on social media engagement, but you have to have a good social skill set offline to have this marketing work well for you. Look at everyone that you deal with as a person who can help further your cause, but you also have to be willing to further their cause.

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