The Value of Social Media For Your Brand
Social Media Optimization is a means of generating brand awareness, publicity and ultimately traffic and customers through the use of online communities and websites. Many of today’s web users interact in these networks everyday for social interaction. And parents, they are spending more hours on these sites a day then you may want to know. No wonder why Johnny failed his last math test.
I am not talking about advertising on these sites (although that does provide some very targeted traffic depending on the site - i.e. facebook), but interacting on their platforms utilizing their free services and networking capabilities.
Here are a few of the social networks, ClassicWines.com as an example, are a part of:
Twitter - Twitter is essentially a “micro-blogging” service that allows you to keep people updated about what you are up to through your cell phone, sms, im or through the web.
MySpace - You all know what MySpace is. For businesses it provides another landing page and outlet for social media interaction. With their features such as embedded video (we post videos through MySpace TV), groups, bulletins and more it provides a great way to link to a whole new community.
Facebook - Similar to MySpace, Facebook let’s businesses connect with a whole new demographic. With their suite of applications and networking capabilities, it is a simpler process to immediately connect with people with similar interests.
Video Sites - As there is a video componenet to ClassicWines.com with Classic Wines TV, distribution and interacting with the video community is very important. Aside from just posting on as many sites as possible, we try to get as much value out of the each community as possible - which involves also giving to the community. This is done through strategic video titling, descriptions and pro-actively communicating with each community - adding friends, commenting on videos, subscriptions, etc.
Some popular video sites we distribute to AND interact in: Blip.tv, YouTube, HowCast, metacafe, you get the point…
So what’s the point of all of this?
This translates to thousands of brand awareness views a day, with each network prominently displaying our brand, personalities, features and links into the site. And ultimately, this also leads to a new source of traffic and user base to the site.
The good stuff: Traffic from social media is statistically better in almost every angle for our site. Samplings:
The average time on our site from social media on average doubles that of traffic via other sources.
The bounce rate is on average 1/3 lower.
So who provides the most traffic (random recent sampling) - Facebook.
So who provides the best quality traffic (deemed by analyzing traffic and activity) - Twitter.
There is a tricky part to this. Yes, traffic is good, but you also need to find traffic that converts. Keeping in mind ClassicWines.com is for consumers over the age of 21 (in the US) we do our best to ensure we properly validate methods and brand building strategies to invest our time in the right directions.
It’s interesting to not just watch new forms of social media form, but become a proactive member of its development. All of the networking stated above is not a full time job, it’s a task dispersed among different member of the team who specialize in specific areas (e.g. video, corporate deveopment, editorial). It is done concurrently as an ongoing task and should be a part of every business as they realize where their customers are - they are watching online video, reading blogs and interacting in social environments!
And this is just one form of online brand development and content syndication. Social media traffic is valuable. Are you tapping into it?
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