Commonwealth Club meetings are never ending source of interesting ideas. This time I went to a session on the use of social networking by InForum group, hosted by Sarah Lacy. It focused on practical ideas for small businesses. Some interesting points that came out of were:
- Make Google be priority #1
- Make sure google can crawl your pages, that they have reasonable links
- alt tags – good, too much flash – bad
- potentially have different urls for different topics that act as landing pads
- Use google webmaster tools
- Use Twitter saved searches and google alerts to discover who’s talking about you and what they’re saying
- If you see opportunities to engage people do it in a human, constructive way that builds dialog
- monitor interesting keywords
- have multiple presences on different services, but bring people back to your main destination
- facebook vanity names work better for things people search for than things they already know
- facebook fan pages and groups are of somewhat limited utility
- Facebook is at its best for publicizing events. In general social networking is good for this because it expands the signal outwards.
- Also consider other such sites as eventbrite, upcoming, going,etc.
- eventbrite is good because it lets you manage the list, and you get a better estimate of who’s coming. with facebook < 40% of those invite show up
- you don’t necessarily have to entertain, but you need to be interesting, bring out some emotion
- With twitter don’t misuse @reply – better to respond in some other medium like email
- It all takes patience, but if you can get dialog going among the users, it will generate lots of leads
