mariare … it really matters. Why? Because your results will be very different between the two. If you are always following the pack — you will always get the butt end of the stick. Period. Social Media, by its very nature, is very dynamic and ever-evolving. Tools that were effective last week, may change (in various ways…) that should cause you to change your marketing tool focus.
Let me illustrate, using examples of factors that should have affected your marketing strategy in the past months:
- When Scribd (a social media marketing website – was once a great tool), changed its linking structure – all links became not valid, making it useless as a search engine marketing tool. Most online marketers dropped off Scribd because of it. However, if they (and in turn you) had done a little investigating – it would be known that by using their new editing tool, all past links could be updated after the change AND new links could be used. Knowing this, kept my team ahead of the game – because we were able to capture a significant amount of traffic knowing what we knew.
- Squidoo. Huh? Yep. It’s likely you have no idea what this is about. Squidoo, another place to develop great conversations in your marketing efforts, has had its relationship with Google changed in the past months. Understanding how Google is treating Squidoo in indexing and ranking would really be helpful to understand the changes necessary in your Lenses to keep the traffic coming.
If your unfamiliar with the benefits of social media marketing, your thinking… whatever, right?
My point exactly. Your likely to be “following the crowd” in the area of social media marketing and its likely to greatly hinder your results. Social media marketing and the various forms of it out there, changes… constantly. It really does. There are changes in the way Google indexes these sites – which will definately change your strategy; changes in the way they each function; changes in the way they handle URLs; and the list goes on and on.
My point? Just assume that changes in social media marketing are inevitable. Following the crowd will not help you, and will only waste your time and money in developing a social media network. Its not enough to throw up a MySpace page and call it good… those days are over my friend