Posted in Social Media | 1 Comment
Ok, maybe not all web design and no, I am not scared. But will it be the future for small businesses and start-ups just coming online?
So, how on earth do I draw the conclusion that Facebook could be the future of web design. A couple of points that I draw my crazy idea from:
1. Facebook’s traffic is rising at an extremely fast rate, check compete.com to see how it compares to Google (I also included an another in there for fun).
2. Optimizing for specific keywords on Google is only getting harder and is even more difficult for smaller businesses.
3. Domain names in particular, the .com tld, are harder and harder to come by. In fact there are over 88 million .com’s compared to a mere 13 million .net domains.
4. Facebook recently launched their “Pay with Facebook” feature, how long until there is a Facebook shopping cart for company pages?
5. People say they love choice, but in reality they choose convenience and value (Walmart vs. downtown America). This point is key. People are being bombarded with different search engines, advertisements and more of everything on the web. Facebook solves that problem.
I am not saying the day is here, Facebook has to make some changes for it to really become an option for small business. For example, Facebook needs to allow more customization of the company pages and the ability to remove ads. If Facebook does take this direction I think it will make sense for a lot of small businesses or new start-ups that would not be able to get the traffic elsewhere.
Posted in News & Events, Social Media | 2 Comments
We always tell our clients that social media and in our case, blogging, is a commitment. A commitment not to be taken lightly, and one that comes with consequences if broken.
There is a lot of irony in the fact that our last blog post was on commitment issues and social media and how to test yourself to make sure you are up to the challenge. Well, apparently we were not up to it.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about the damage:
1. We had a good amount of traffic coming to the Inovator, and now it’s dropped, significantly.
2. People were talking with us via the blog, emails, tweets and yes even the good old phone. But we left that conversation and it’s cold now.
3. Lastly, I can only imagine how many people must have thought the worst had become us and we closed up shop. Quite the opposite I can assure you, but actions speak louder than words.
So why am I telling you all of this? For one, I am sorry, and secondly and most importantly, I don’t want you to make the same mistake.
Posted in Social Media | 1 Comment
Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and the list goes on. Social Media is all the rave right now, but is it worth anything to your business? Sure there has been success stories, like Dell’s $1 million in revenue over the ’08 holiday season. But are you Dell? Can you realistically look to make that kind of revenue on Twitter or any social network for that matter?
Regardless of whether or not you can make money via social networking, the bigger question is, do you have the time to commit to it?
Everything in life takes work. You can expect to get nothing in return if you put nothing into it. So try this, before you take the plunge of signing up your company’s brand on Twitter or creating a Facebook fan page, sign yourself up. Yea, you personally. And instead of tweeting about random things such as what you had for lunch, try to tweet about things related to your industry. How many tweets can you come up with? How many followers can you get? How many useful conversations can you have?
I think you might be amazed at how hard it is to stay on topic in a social network. There are a lot of companies who’s social networking presence is either just a “me too” dialogue or is just used to spam users with promotions. Social networking is about being real, well as real as you can be in the digital space, and people quickly see through fake and feeble attempts of companies just trying to push their brand.