So, I’m one of these people who has only recently ventured into Twitter, FB etc. There was a time when I used to be interested in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) but that was back when SEO used to be sort of worthwhile. Back then, a small bit of effort could be enough to put you ahead of the game.
Then to be honest I took my eye off that particular ball for a couple of years. Now that I’m re-visting the whole online PR world, I realise just how much things have moved on.
While the SEO industry has grown exponentially, you just get the feeling that no-one really knows what’s going on any more. There’s about 50 tweets a day coming in about how you can boost your popularity on this or that. Another 50 tweets saying that SEO as we know it is dead. Everyone’s trying to out-pace everyone else. Then just when you get your website up to speed, that’s not enough anymore it has to be made suitable for mobile devices (that’s probably true), post penguin, bla bla. The fact is all of this gadgetology is totally unprecedented. Who can possibly know where it’s all at, where it’s all going and just what the real value of it all is to your business? Once you manage to jump over the bar there’s always someone there to tell you that if you could jump another couple of inches higher you’d be 10 times better off. To the extent that there’s a serious smell of pure unadulterated crap about the whole thing. Almost dot com bubble reminiscent.
I also recently came across a quite successful little business in Mullingar. Amazingly, when I went to look them up online I realised they don’t even have a website. Imagine, the cheek of them to fly in the face of all that “top expert” advice. Hah! Fact is they don’t really need to worry about an online presence – they’re service is reliable,everyone knows they do good work and they’re just damned good at what they do all round. It’s not rocket science.
In conclusion there’s no doubt there are clever people in the Midlands using Social Media to boost their sales even during these hard times. But the simple fundamentals of supply and demand will always win out in the end regardless of how much time you spend / waste on your online promotion. And there’s nothing easy about online sales any more. So just don’t jeopardize your core activity while you doss your whole day away on twitter and facebook. And don’t let your staff do it either.