My Travels on the Net

I just came out of the session on SEO and Social Media Marketing. Although I wanted to slam my head against table because the chummy, clubby-ness of the panelists, I did manage to get one nagging question answered.

On the surface, social media seems like a natural fit for service professionals. If you write good content, people vote for it which gets exposure for your website. The problem with social media is that the “linksters” voting on social media sites are typically young men (and to a lesser degree women) who are highly technically savvy. My client’s target markets are usually C level executives who don’t have the time or inclination to dink around on the internet. The question become “How can my grown up clients use social media to reach their target markets?”

The answer is one of targeting content to the social media audience. If you can find something related to your business or the concerns of your clients and find something about it that appeals to the social media demographic, you can cross the divide. Linksters link to your site which improves rankings so it’s more likely to come up in the search results when your target markets are looking for your service.

It also helps if you refocus the purpose of social media from getting your target market to read your article to focusing on getting links to the site; especially links from bloggers. It’s more reasonable to expect that C level executives are reading blogs than voting on social networking sites.

Labels: emarketing, links, service businesses, social media