Site Promotion Through Social Networking
Recently I was reading a post on a forum saying that AdWords are more effective than social networks as social networks only work for bigger organisations or high street brands. It’s a statement I strongly disagree with. Social network “share” buttons such as retweet delicious and dig are important as people who like what you have to say then have the option of sharing it with their friends. For example…
Jane is a fashion designer who has a small on line boutique store; she has no foot traffic walking past a high street shop and is relatively unknown. In the weeks leading up to the launch of her first collection she has been writing blogs and twittering about the process, her excitement and giving sneak peaks of the designs. Now initially only friends and family would follow her posts but as she continued to post friends of those friends started to follow her. So much so that by the time launch date arrived she had a good couple of hundred people following her, interacting with her and ready to buy.
When the online store went live, she sent out a 10% off voucher to people in her various networks and people flooded to her site and bought. She had no budget for AdWords and she didn’t get tens of thousands of hits but her bounce rate (people entering and leaving your site via the page they entered in a matter of seconds) was very low and her conversion rate was very high. People loved her designs and started talking about them within their circles and blogs and the next wave of people went to her site and bought (more than the first time).
Well I could go on and on but my point is this…she still doesn’t use AdWords and is still not a high street brand but she is very successful. AdWords can have their place but need to be targeted and certainly not the only part of your site promotion strategy. Remember Google doesn’t care about the quality of “click-throughs”, but they do care about the quantity.
