There’s a disturbing trend currently taking hold in social media marketing and community management. Businesses are hiring firms to develop their social profiles, but aren’t asking anything else. They aren’t asking what the progress is, aren’t asking for data points, referral information or engagement stats.
Businesses aren’t asking for a return on their investment. They’re just ticking off the “social media” box on their media plans and moving forward. While I’m sure plenty of agencies are getting away with this, boosting their revenue because they aren’t being asked to provide anything resembling proof, I’m confident that this will do more harm than good to the industry, and indeed social media as a whole. It makes me glad that that, unlike many others, Renaissance Creative does not take that path.
Today Foursquare added a new feature to its web site: Buttons.
This means the most to businesses actively using Foursquare, because it makes it possible to create buttons for individual locations and embed them on a web site as a button. Here’s the official word from Foursquare’s blog:
As social media gained a foothold in the world of ecommerce, more buttons and widgets began appearing on web sites. The thing is, they were appearing in worthless places on the sites.
It became something of a web development standard to stick links to your company’s social media profiles at the bottom of the web site, where almost no-one will see them. That doesn’t work.
Photo Credit: Alana Fisher
With every online community, there exists some give-and-take between the members and those in charge of running and maintaining the community.
When a community is just starting out, there will be a period of experimentation where the users begin trying to understand how their membership in the community benefits them, and the community moderator understands what works and what does not, to encourage debate and involvement.
The process is similar when a previously dormant community, suddenly becomes less dormant and more active.
Community members become accustomed to a low level of engagement. So when activity and engagement increases, community members will react to it.
While not everyone reacts the same way to changes in a community they are a part of, the majority will react in one of three ways:
While having a dynamic web site is something most businesses should have, if you’re a small company just starting out, it might look more like an additional expense than a genuine resource.
For companies facing that decision, let me remind you that while Facebook is at its heart a social platform, it also serves all of the same functions as a very basic web site.
If your company trying to develop a web presence in the most cost-effective way possible, consider taking the amount you would have spent on a web site and apply it towards developing your business’s Facebook profile.
Here’s why:
