Twitter, perhaps more than other social networks, has somewhat of a reputation for marketing spam. Quite often you'll see companies using their Twitter accounts for nothing but self-promotion, to the point where the entire tweet stream becomes tantamount to spam. Not surprisingly, this is a good way to lose followers fast, and what these companies are not realizing is that there's a reason the word "social" is the first part of social media. Here's how you can avoid making the same mistake.
If you've been at all involved with your site's SEO over the past few years, it's likely that link building has been an important part of your overall online marketing strategy. This is because Google has always placed such great importance on how many external sites link back to yours, as a determining factor for how relevant and important your site is to your niche. However, with increasing improvements to the sophistication with which Google determines site ranking, there has been some talk that link building is no longer as important. But is that really the case?
If we had to pick one word to describe today's online experience, "dynamic" might be a good choice. Whereas the early days of the web featured mostly static pages with lots of text and not much else, the sites you see now are bursting with information of all kinds, with a lot of two-way interaction and audience engagement. The advent of multimedia, of course, has played a huge role in this evolution. As broadband speeds have become faster and media quality has improved, things like images, video, and even live streaming have become not only possible, but commonplace.
Fifteen or even ten years ago, the web was a sea of text. Sure, there were photos and even some video, but bandwidth limitations kept these aspects of the web to a minimum, and if you wanted to get a message across, well-written copy was the way to do it.
Marketing over social media, like most online endeavors, is less a monetary investment, and more an investment of time and effort. It takes work to keep up with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, or however many other social networks you belong to, and keeping those conversations going strong is the key to making the effort worth it. So when you run across a new smaller, niche social network that seems like it could be promising for your business, it can be difficult to decide what to do. Do you really have time to be taking on another set of social media responsibilities? On the other hand, could a social network more tailored to your specific audience be exactly the boost your strategy needs?
With all the talk of Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and other social media, it's easy to start feeling like perhaps older protocols like email are on the way out in terms of marketing power. While it's certainly true that methods of online communication have changed and evolved dramatically over the past few years, it's important to remember that email has some benefits that other marketing methods don't have, and as such shouldn't be ignored as an essential component of your online marketing strategy.
