Let me introduce myself, I’m Aaron Whiffin from Webbed Feet UK a Salisbury-based company that, among other things, are specialists in online marketing including social media.
A lot of people have recently asked me about social networks, especially Google+, and asked where they should spend their time. So I thought I’d post on our web development blog.
Firstly we should consider what is best for offline marketing; Mail shots, cold calling, advertisements in newspapers and magazines, Yellow Pages and radio for example, all have their place, and certain businesses will benefit from different methods to others. Online marketing is the same. Don’t think that every business will benefit the same from paid adverts on PPC (pay per click) campaigns, SEO (search engine optimisation), social networking and email marketing. And to the same degree social media is also the same. One social network may favour one business type more than another.
So rather than concluding that “Twitter is best”, which may or may not be accurate, we should look at each of the four main social networks and discuss the pros, cons and features of each. Of course there are lots more social networks; I haven’t mentioned Foursquare or MySpace in this article. We shall concentrate on the most asked-about networks at the time of writing.
Facebook is huge, it has been reported that it gets more hits than Google! Over three-quarters of a billion people use it, with users spending on average over 15 hours per month on the site. This critical mass is what makes Facebook a major contender.
With Facebook you ‘friend’ someone, then you can see their profile and they can see yours. You can update statuses, upload pictures and videos, include your life history, join fan pages, setup groups, and download a variety of apps. Facebook is very powerful and has thousands of features. In fact many people think that there is too much to handle.
For businesses it’s great that you can setup pages or groups and link to and from RSS feeds or Twitter. This has the advantage that it may become viral, in that people can ‘like’ it on their profile, others see it and like it, and so the exposure grows.
However, it’s very hard to separate your personal and professional life. Do your clients really want to see a picture of you and your friends at the pub? Plus people put so much information on, and the privacy settings are complicated, it’s hard to know exactly who is seeing what.
For business to business, Facebook isn’t generally considered the most important social network. But for business to consumer it is a completely different story. From small clubs and societies all the way up to large corporate companies such as Coca-Cola, it’s a great way of getting your message out to the masses.
Twitter has far fewer features than Facebook, it consists of status updates known as tweets. These are limited to 140 characters. It is acceptable to tweet several times in an hour in some cases, but for that reason tweets become out of date very quickly; Twitter is very much ‘for the moment’.
Twitter contains hashtags, which are a way of indexing your content so that others can search or several people can discuss about a particular topic. So, for our business, using the hashtags #Salisbury or #socialmedia could benefit us greatly.
The trouble with Twitter is that so much is going on people often miss your tweets. Also there are several protocols used that may confuse beginners, for example special hashtags such as #ff for ‘Follow Friday’ (where you suggest other Twitter users to follow). Plus it can be hard to get in touch with people if they are not following you.
From both a business to business and a business to consumer point of view, Twitter is a very powerful tool. It’s a way of you broadcasting your message to your followers as frequently as you want, and conversely a way of seeing what other people are up to at any given time. I would suggest that the majority of businesses use Twitter.
LinkedIn is a professional social network. For anyone who wants to network with other business owners and/or professionals it’s a fantastic tool and has many features that no other social network can even come close to.
Like Facebook you can set up a profile and have various apps. There are groups (discussion forums), events and many other useful tools. It is especially useful for building careers and recruiting.
Originally the idea of LinkedIn was only to add people that you knew very well or had done business with, but these days most people add any networking contacts in order to broadcast their business’s message. This is great for a user, but is slightly hindering the connection-chain where by a user can hunt for a desired contact (connection) and see the chain of connections that link to them and get referrals into the company. However the functionality can be used and it’s possible to search for people based on company size and their job title... very handy!
For business to non-professional consumers then LinkedIn isn’t of use, but as a professional network it is currently untouched.
Google+
Google+ (pronounced “google plus”) is the new contender. It is still in beta (testing mode) and unfortunately as it is new, it doesn’t seem to have the same user-base as the others. From my own findings, if I add all of my Facebook and LinkedIn contacts then only around 5-10% are currently on Google+, and those few don’t seem to post much.
The main feature of Google+ is the ‘circles’. These basically allow you to separate your posts so that if you upload something, for example a photo, you can set to share it with your friends, but not work colleagues; or close friends, but not everyone else. It’s solving Facebook’s sharing and privacy issues. Plus being Google, it is designed to be quick and easy to use, but it doesn’t seem to be that good just yet. Business pages will be featured at some stage, but at the moment don’t exist.
So why should people use Google+? That is a difficult question. At the moment, if things stayed the same, you shouldn’t. If it takes off, it could be massive, and the 5-10% of people I mentioned earlier seem to be signing up just in case. Yes there are drawbacks; Despite Google’s efforts, it isn’t that easy to use, there is no critical mass, people are not posting much... but remember that it is new and being developed.
So regarding Google+, I would advise only using it if you’re sure that you’ve mastered the other social networks, or if you want to give it a try. I wouldn’t expect much business benefit currently, but perhaps it’s good to get in there early.
Summary
As you can see there are four social networks that are all completely different from each other.
So which ones should you use? Well unfortunately that all depends on your business type and the amount of time that you have. You’re better to pick one and use it properly, that have several and not to use them. You could of course update one and have it feed into the others automatically using apps, but that’s a different matter...
For our business: local website designers in Wiltshire, we use all four. We have to as we specialise in online marketing, however the two that jump out at me are Twitter and LinkedIn (we could live without Facebook and Google+). If I had to narrow it down and choose just one I’d without a doubt choose LinkedIn, but would regret not using Twitter. But please remember that this is specific to our business, and a hairdresser, for example, may have far more success with Facebook alone.
What should you put on social networking sites, and how should you use them? Well if I get enough requests and tweets, I’ll write an article on that shortly.