Social Networking and Web 2.0 for Lead Gen
Social Networking and Web2.0 – these are among the latest buzzwords which you’ll be hearing a lot of if you aren’t already. If you are at all engaged in current developments, you have probably heard about these by now and are aware that social networking sites are a type of website which aim to bring together people with similar interests. Among the most heavily used of these sites are LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook.
The idea behind this in terms of traffic generation is that where there are people, there are traffic generation opportunities. The traffic generation strategies normally revolve around mobilising a community of enthusiasts that exist within these social networking sites around your product and service area and then getting them to your website. There are a few problems that this presents for business lead generation.
Firstly, the target audience is very often in the sub-30 age group. If your product or service is aimed at HR managers who tend to be aged 35-40+, pretty conservative and aren’t necessarily trawling Myspace all the time, then you may not actually be able to generate very high-quality content by using this type of technique.
Also, social network users tend to be a hard sell – you have to be careful here and not just come off as a salesperson. Introduce your product or service subtly instead of just trying to advertise in the traditional sense. You have to have the right product and be able to motivate your fellow social networking users.
Nick Schoonen’s blog rczero.com (he’s a colleague of mine) is aimed at remote control hobbyists, featuring remote control cars, planes and the like. He has a strategy to monetize this site which I won’t get into here; the point is that Nick has successfully been able to use MySpace and other social networks to drive a lot of traffic to his site. Why has he been so successful? Because his target audience is a good match with the user base of these sites.
Let’s suppose that your service was rubbish removal. It’s pretty hard to imagine setting up a community on Myspace all around rubbish removal and hope to get people to your site, because people frankly aren’t interested in that unless they have a need for it right at that moment.
Social networking sites are not necessarily the best place for your business’ lead generation efforts, in other words. It all depends on your product; other strategies may be far more cost effective for you. Before resorting to social networking to drive traffic to your site, I would urge you to try out some other strategies.
Filed under: Marketing