When you listen to the media these days, they seem to think Facebook and Twitter are full of people hanging around and talking about pointless things. And they are, really, just like the rest of the world; most of the conversations that take place are not heavy on content, and certainly wouldn’t qualify as profound. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any “real” conversations going on.
The fact is, both Facebook and Twitter are full of real people who may be your customers, and it’s how they stay in touch with their friends and family. Increasingly, companies are finding that a Facebook and Twitter presence is useful in maintaining contact with their customers, and in finding the trends that interest them.
When you come right down to it, Facebook and Twitter are popular places to hang out because you can discuss anything at all. There’s a lot of traffic flowing through them, and there are a lot of eyeballs looking at their pages every second of every day.
Those eyeballs often belong to your customers, and getting in front of those customers more often can only be a good thing for your business.
So while the news and other mass media may be treating these social networks as strange things that teenagers and young adults do, the fact is that this is where the people are – and it’s where your business ought to be, if you want to attract new customers and stay on the minds of current customers.
After all, many of your customers are teenagers and young adults… and all of them have been teenagers and young adults at some point. If you really checked, you’d be surprised how many of your customers are already on Facebook and Twitter.
One of the biggest lies we’ve been told over the years is that anything is better than nothing… that simply doing something is more than most people ever do, and whatever you might do is clearly going to be better than that.
The reality is that whatever you do communicates to the rest of the world what everything else you do is going to be.
This is particularly true in the context of your websites, which represent your work to the rest of the world. When you have a bad website, the conclusion of your visitor isn’t that what you do best is clearly not to build websites… it’s that you must not do much of anything well.
The perception, in short, is that a website is easy to build. If your website is built badly, you have done a bad job of something easy – and on anything harder, you’ll undoubtedly do an even worse job.
Now, we all know that for most businesses, building a web site isn’t what you do best. It’s not what you call your “core competency” – unless, of course, you’re in the web site design business. Which most of us aren’t.
The answer, fortunately, is simple. When constructing your online presence, put your best foot forward – by getting someone who knows how to design and construct a website that looks every bit as good as everything else you do.
We can’t all do everything. You don’t try to do your own plumbing and remodeling in your office, unless of course that’s your business… and why should your website be any different? Going to a professional who specializes in website design is simply the only reasonable choice – and certainly better than nothing.
We’ve all heard the old saying “if you build it, they will come.” We’ve also heard “build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.”
These sayings aren’t really true.
Regardless of how great what you’ve built may be, people have to know about it, and the way most people find out about these things is to visit a search engine. Once they’ve typed in a quick description of what they want, they’ll click on three or four of the sites on the first page – usually the ones near the top.
And if your site isn’t there, people simply aren’t going to show up. You might have the greatest solution in the world to their problems, and they simply don’t know.
The good news is that for most sites, it’s not terribly difficult to get your site ranking higher on the search engines – coming up in that first page of results. This can generate a massive new stream of traffic, and a massive new stream of income to go with it.
The technique in question is called search engine optimization, or SEO. The search engines are looking for specific things on your website, and if they don’t find them, your site comes up lower in the search results… a lot lower. But with a little time and effort from an SEO professional, you can get your site higher in the rankings.
It’s not just about building it anymore; it’s about building it in the right way, so the search engines give you the ranking you deserve. Once you’ve had a true SEO specialist go over your site and tweak it for higher results, you’ll be amazed at how your business – and your bottom line – improves.