When doing research to buy a new car do you only go to the manufactures website for your research and then make a purchase? Or do you research third party sites, ask friends, look at the competition, read reviews, read other sites. The internet makes comparison shopping and research extremely easy. This is exactly why companies need to take an active role in social media sites and the development of new internal web properties to help protect their brand and message.
The first thing most potential customers will do is search for the name of your company and start to look at the sites listed instead of going directly to your domain. The more spots you have the easier it will be to control your message.
According to Jakob Neilsen the web’s leading usability expert and author of several books including “The Web User Experience”
“When we let users loose to go anywhere they wanted on the Web, they went to a search engine 88 percent of the time. Only in 12 percent of cases did they go straight to a Web site. In 93 percent of searches, the users in our study only visited the first SERP (Search Engine Results Page), which usually held ten search results plus a number of ads. In only seven percent of cases did users page on to a second SERP. Only 47 percent of users scrolled the first SERP, which means that 53 percent saw only those search hits that were ‘above the fold.’ “
So why would you want to create, actively work, and link these social profiles? Would you rather own 5 or more of the top spots for your company name or leave them open to potential competition, or bad press. Additionally these are the types of sites potential customers will visit to research more about your brand to gain a complete understanding. Sites like Twitter, Flickr, and Linkedin are well known and hold lots of weight. With fresh quality content, proper linking strategies and a little time we are finding these pages displaying right along side corporate sites. Then new platforms like our own Local Mojo is up and coming and also starting to show SERP results.
If your online reputation is important to your business it needs to be treated in such a manner with serious resources dedicated towards it. It is a continual process that needs to worked, and measured for optimized results. If you think we can help your company out with these services go ahead and contact us.
