Does social media work with boring clients?
-
OK, I'm not being rude, but I have a few clients who work in areas that really don't stimulate people - they are just needed.
Examples are:
Accountants
Chartered Surveyors
Forklift truck suppliersNot the most inspiring list...
So my question is whether to pursue the whole social media side of SEO with them. I mean, who wants to "like" their chartered surveyor? Do they have anything interesting to "tweet" about?
If anyone has experience of this type of field, then any suggestions would be greatly appreciated,
-
Accounting, at least, doesn't have to be boring. They could use social media to share their own content about small business tips, home budgeting tips, tax tips, etc. or to share and comment on news stories about the industry. Will you have a giant following? Probably not. But it's still worth a few minutes a day.
As for the other companies, those are very niche and not sexy. In that case, social media might be primarily about branding and relationship-building -- positioning yourself as a friendly, fun, family company by sharing stories about the workplace, the owner, etc. Then again, there might be a B2B network in those niches. You just have to expand a little. Who buys forklifts? Who hires surveyors? What would they find interesting?
-
We are an industrial manufacturer and although it probably does not help us directly, it still helps.
An example of this is for branding purposes. If someone is doing research on us, the content that we generate and distribute in social media may help them to chose us (we may be a "subject matter expert" in something they are looking for).
-
A lot of different niche's don't necessarily benefit from social media but as mentioned previous it is still good to have them. You need a platform to keep customers/users updated when things happen, such as site going down, press information, and relations.
Social media has a wide range of platforms, and it will most likely take time to find out which platform is most beneficial. Google+, Facebook, Twitter are usually obvious pluses, but I noticed LinkedIn works very well for a lot of these businesses.
LinkedIn is extremely good at connecting B2B relations.
-
Thanks for the tips, but I've got to say - a chartered surveyor trumps an attorney on dullness - or at least mine does!
-
Very difficult to get off of the ground and getting it to convert into any significant traffic is definitely a challenge and often not worth the effort.
However, how strong are social signals to Google. For instance does setting up automated twitter feeds to make 20 posts a day benefit you more than simply having a twitter account? For all we know Google could just give your site a checkmark yes or no if your company has a twitter account. I would at very least set up accounts for FB, Twitter and G+ and reciprocally link between them and your site so that Google knows you are in the social media space. Post a couple times a week, for an attorney there should always be some interesting cases in the news you could comment about for example, or just post about your work or a collegues work.
example: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tom-Anelli-The-DWI-GUY/127968698749
-
Niches like this are in the need for an advertising company if they will need to get social about it.
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUG9qYTJMsI - that was not done by an SEO company - it's done by an advertising company. It's a boring vertical and they did it. It's not an exact recipe for success but the basic idea is the same - if tehy can go viral they have the social side covered - if not - the ROI on social will be for sure negative.
If going this route - with something exceptional - is out of the question I would focus on other areas - you can have a good visibility and organic coverage without social with no problem - a lot of people are doing great without being involved in social.
I might be wrong - this is juts an opinion
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What is everyone using for social media reporting now?
Now that Moz has retired the social element, I'm at a loss as to what to use instead. What have you all switched to? We use Hootsuite to schedule Twitter and LinkedIn posts for our clients, and Facebook native mode for scheduling there. At the end of each month I produce an SEO report for each client and up to now, that's always included the social report from Moz. I want to be able to report on the following for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. what traffic has come to the client's website from each social channel growth in followers/fans engagement for the month eg how many retweets, likes, shares etc best performing posts on each channel I've looked at Sprout, but it seems to me that in order for Sprout to give you all the reporting info you need, you have to use it to manage all your social media channels, and as mentioned above, we already use Hootsuite for this. I don't want to switch completely. Twitter Analytics gives me the info I want for Twitter, but doesn't output this to a pdf style graphical report. I just want a nice summary to give my clients every month. Any ideas as to the best way to report on all this while still using Hootsuite to do the scheduling? My feeling is that I just want a flexible, easy to use and comprehensive reporting tool that covers all social channels, and not a social media management tool.
Social Media | | mfrgolfgti0 -
Graphics tool for social media profiles etc
Hi Can anyone recommend a free or v cheap graphics tool for social media company page profiles etc Ideally looking to be able to upload a company logo that then gets converted into all profile image sizes, preferably with a banner option too and ideally with related extras like favicon creation etc Anyone know of one ? (I have tried Pablo by Buffer but does images for social posting only) All Best Dan
Social Media | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Counting unique landing pages in Google Analytics: social vs organic channels
Remember the technique Rand posted for counting the unique indexed landing pages on a site? http://moz.com/blog/indexation-for-seo-real-numbers-in-5-easy-steps I'm using Google Analytics to compare this result for the "social" channel vs. the "organic search" channel. The idea is to see whether social or search delivers people to more unique landing pages. I would expect organic search to yield a significantly higher count, due to long tail searches for relatively obscure terms. We have an archive of over 500k pages that Google could be indexing, even if only a fraction of a percent of those might be getting social mentions. But that's not what the numbers show -- I'm seeing roughly 10% higher numbers for the Social channel than for Organic Search. Again, I'm counting unique landing pages here, not the total pageviews or visits. If anyone else here is monitoring these metrics, please chime in with your results. What's the baseline expectation for a large website with hundreds of thousands of pages of issue-centric user-generated content? Should search traffic provide 2x more landing page exposures than social? 5x? 10x? or 0.9x, as in my case? In short, I believe these numbers are pointing to an indexing/ranking problem following a recent site redesign.
Social Media | | mcglynn0 -
Improving page rank for a social media profile?
What are some ways to build links to social media page that links back to your website? Example: Building links to my Pinterest page that links back to my website. Who do we pump up the Pinterest page?
Social Media | | KrisPhoto0 -
About Onlywire, stumbleupon ans social medias?
Hi, 1/I want to ask do you use onlywire service for you websites? Is it beneficial for a web site? 2/ Can Google see so many links from different social medias after you use onlywre as a spam (coming immediately every time you put new url in onlywire) or as something positive, especially for a website which doesn't have so many links from different web site per day? 3/ Do you think stumbleupon, delicious.com, etc are all helpful for SEO of a website and have influence in Google ranking? I know about facebook, twitter but there are so many social media websites and is it worth to have accounts all there and post the same stuff? Thank you 🙂
Social Media | | vladokan0 -
Facebook Page likes vs Webpage facebook likes - Social Media Query
I have a website and a facebook page. I have the Facebook Social Plugin on my website which shows my facebook page likes - This is currently at approx 140 likes. Is there a difference between facebook page likes and webpage likes? For SEO purposes, should I be concentrating less on the Facebook page and more on building facebook likes for the website? Are there any guides on this? What gets people to like a website as opposed to a web-page?
Social Media | | MangoMM0 -
Social channels, tools sites for promoting a blog or article
Hello, I would like to promote blogs, articles etc. Can you give me some tips, advice on how to promote these? I guess everyone starts with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. After that, Reddit, StumbleUpon. Any other good ways (penguin proof) to promote a blog, article etc? Any tools you use: SocialOomph or something similar? Thanks! 🙂
Social Media | | ThomasH0 -
Are social signals passed with a 301 redirect
Hi all, A question came up today that I don't think I've seen answered before. We hear all the time how important social sharing metrics are becoming to SEO, but what happens to the social signals of a page when it is 301 redirected? Are the social signals forwarded on in the same manner as link juice? Has anyone ever seen any experiments carried out around this before? Thanks very much in advance for any information shared. Cheers.
Social Media | | searchysearchy1