Social Media Gurus to the Back of the Line

Obviously you don’t need online-customer.com to tell you that social media can be a critical factor in the success of your web-business. But let’s stand back from the mirror to get a balanced picture.
There is much anecdotal information about Facebook and Twitter, and other social media. Most of it shouts that without them you will not be successful. And this may or may not be true, depending on the type of business you have. If you have time I suggest you follow this link to gain a better scope of things: webseoanalytics.com.

But to continue let me use the metaphor of a formula one racing car. The F1 technology on offer will get you to where you want to go (on the track anyways) in a very short time frame. But guess what? You need to know how to use the technology...effectively. And to do that requires much effort and a steep learning curve.

The same for social media. Just putting Facebook on your website won’t make much difference to sales. Also having your own ‘business’ Facebook or Twitter may not achieve the customer market segment that you require. The reason is that you have to satisfy the search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo that you are what you say you are.

Even when you get through to your social media driven market you need to make sense to them. Making product purchase sense to a customer is now, and in the future, the principal activity that builds businesses.

So what’s the message here? Don’t spend all of your time engineering your social media expertise and/or placement, and especially not at the expense of explaining who you are as a business, what you have to offer and what you can do for people. Even worse is becoming the guru on ‘social connectivity’, then only to find out that you fall short with an inappropriate product range that reflects on your credibility.

It’s definitely a challenge to be able to conquer all the technology and promotional hurdles, but also offer a valuable product or service - a challenge that statistically is not in your favour. Have a look at the following if you doubt my words (note web 2.0 is the social media platform): tomuse.com

So even though smarter ideas and higher level technology are on the way to facilitate even cleverer social media, I am sure you can see that the issue is to first focus on the fundamentals of your business, and translate them into a compelling offer for your online customers.

In other words decide what makes your business special, and then build an online presence around it.
Concept: a web business is a business first, and a website second.