Is Facebook platform a loser for some businesses? I extremely doubt it, but a friend and colleague of mine, Geoff Livingston says it is for his business.
Instead of saying "you should do this" (as one would say in consulting a client), we tend to say to our fellow internet marketers "have you tried this? it worked for me."
He also discusses his opposition to what is a pillar of my own marketing: the humanized, personalized presence of the CEO blogger or "personal branding" as he calls it.
He says he made some mistakes, blending personal and business posts.
I bet I've made even more mistakes than he did, but who's bragging?
I abandoned my entire branding, Vaspers the Grate, that I spent 5 years building -- and redefined my brand as Pluperfecter. I have abandoned a bunch of my older blogs and wikis and social platforms, having signed up for over 100 different accounts. Remember Pownce, FreeBase, CampFire, Jaiku, Yippykaya, Unthink, So.cl, Spock, Gleamd, Ning, 8apps, Diaspora?
http://geofflivingston.com/2014/11/17/if-i-had-to-start-social-over-again/
QUOTE
Today, because I have shifted much of my content production to photography, I spend more time on Flickr and 500 Pixels than I do Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram or Google+. When I do participate on those sites, more of ten than not it’s either for business or to post a picture.
I look at the interactions with my customer base, and believe in some instances that I am wasting my time. So given my customers, passions and the interaction, where would I start?
In the mid 2000s, everyone associated their personalities with their blogs. It was the age of personal brands, and like many others — in spite of my protests about personal branding as a movement — I weaved my personal social media activity and blogging for business together.
As a result, it was harder to scale prior companies, and my own personal adventures and missteps impacted business. Tenacity5 is different (I hope). I have a role as president, and while I am the front man, but it isn’t a personality vehicle. It is a business....
I’ve blogged before about how Facebook is almost a zero-sum game for pure marketing posts. Analytics continues to reaffirm that when posts are marketing centric they fail. When they are personal, they tend to do well. Though I caught a lot of grief back then for not marketing on Facebook, I am no longer the only one experiencing this.
END QUOTE
I market my SEO expertise on Facebook. I don't reach out to businesses, but to individuals who may own a business or know someone who does.
So I don't really do B2B. I do it indirectly I guess you could say.
Sharing your expertise is the key, whether it's on FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, G+, whatever. Since I do SEO for local businesses in my area, it makes sense to promote my expertise (not so much my company) on FB where I am friends with so many local people.
It's been working well for me, but each case, like I say, is different and has unique dynamics and analytics.
Re: blogging, Geoff states:
QUOTE
Today, I wouldn’t waste my time blogging as a primary business activity. In fact, for the most part I have slowed down significantly. I still post once a week here, mostly because I believe that a blog still has a role in my online life, even if it is for the fewer. But the topics are stream of conscious now. There is no editorial mission outside of what I think, and no real business goal outside of supporting personal projects.
END QUOTE
I would disagree, only to say that I keep up my Pluperfecter blog daily (try to), because of the incredible SEO power it gives my Streight SEO brand. By feeding SEO topic information to the Google Hummingbird search engine, I keep rising higher and higher in SERPs.
And I can point potential clients to my blog as a showcase of my practical and hard nosed business and IT acumen.
No comments:
Post a Comment