Is Social Media Important – maybe, yes, no

While the entire internet marketing/SEO industry seems to be clamoring over Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and various other Social Media (SM) outlets, I take a different approach when asked, “Is Social Media important for my business?”

Unlike most every other internet marketing specialist, I don’t believe that it is the end-all and be-all of internet marketing.  Instead of grabbing the money from a business who read an article that said Social Media was important for them, I take a different approach and actually ask, why, because your business may require focus in other online marketing areas such as proper website design/development or search engine optimization first.

It really comes down to:

A) Do you truly understand your consumer and their interaction, purchase decision & research habits?

B) Why do you really want to have a SM program?

C) Do you have the time, budget and expertise to properly see your program through?

There is no doubt about it; there are some businesses that can really leverage specific Social Media outlets to better engage their client base, receive feedback/reviews to share with prospective clients, know exactly who their clients are, provide information on new products/services and even generate additional revenue in some cases.  On the other hand there are others that when you take an analytical view of things, there is very little return for all the time that is required in order to be successful.

Search engines are right now trying to figure out how to leverage various social media inputs into their algorithms to provide you with more personalized and accurate search engine results; but that is VERY complicated and they can’t seem to get it right at this point in time.  Will they ever get there?  Yes to some queries (news, entertainment, etc. possibly) but no on most other search query types.  If they can’t figure this out, Social Media, can’t and won’t, play an overly important part in helping your website rank as high as possible in Google, Bing, etc.

It all comes down to the three questions I posed earlier.

So is Social Media important for YOUR business?  Maybe, yes, no