Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Is Social Media a Necessary Evil?

Contributed by Stacy Bass

On any given day, I can rant for hours about my feelings regarding social media.  How the anonymity makes people behave in a manner that they otherwise would not.  How social media provides a playground for the proliferation of rumors and gossip mongering.  Plus, I don’t really care what someone else is having for dinner, unless of course, they are making it for me.  Blah, blah, blah.  I’ve been known to wax poetic about how social media is harming society and eliminating people’s ability for free thought.  I can go on and on and on, and according to my husband, often do.

So, here I sit writing about how I dislike social media on our blog.  When I’m done with my blog post, I’ll post it Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and so on.  I’ll hope that people “like” it, "friend" us, "follow" us, and so on.  Go ahead and say it…hypocritical much?  Yes, in fact, it is hypocritical because as much as I can complain about social media’s impact on individuals, I cannot deny that as a small business owner I must embrace social media and tout its importance to our own business and the businesses of our clients. 

The number one goal of any marketing campaign is to reach as much of the intended market as possible with a specific message that is intended to drive a positive response.  Enter social media.  Not only does social media provide the platform to get a message out to a targeted audience, it can easily be shared with others with a single click and, most of all, IT IS FREE.  Free marketing…every small business owner’s dream.  Very simply, the only cost to marketing your business via social media is your time. 

If free marketing is not enough to convince you of the importance of developing a social media strategy, effective social media use also significantly increases search engine ranking.  As we all know, it is very important for your business to rank high on search engines.  Anything that can increase this ranking is very important, and again, it’s free.  Posts, likes, tweets, retweets, +1’s, pins, etc. create what Google refers to as “quality signals”.  “Quality signals” are a key component of the algorithm used by Google to drive ranking. 

To summarize…
  • Social media is free marketing.
  • Social media is targeted to your specific audience.
  • People can easily share your message with others via social media.
  • Consistent use of social media will boost your ranking in search engines.

So, is social media a necessary evil?  As much as it pains me to say, yes, it is undeniable that social media is a necessary evil for any company's marketing plan.




Select Web Solutions is always eager to help our customers find the best web strategy for each of our clients.  We would welcome the opportunity to build or update your existing web strategy to meet the needs of today’s technology driven world.  Select Web Solutions is an Orange County website development company in Rancho Santa Margarita, CA.  Our products include Orange County custom website solutions, WebZeo affordable websites in Orange County, MobZeo Orange County mobile websites ProZeo Orange County social media profiles ListZeo Orange County Website Business Listing ServiceSendZeo Orange County newsletter marketing, MailZeo hosted email services in Orange County, SEOLight affordable Orange County SEO, and much more.  

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