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In previous episodes I’ve talked about the importance of social engine optimisation. This covered a wide area of topics on the importance of keeping your information fresh and the surprisingly slow reaction times of search engines. Often taking up to a month to realise your page has updated. Although there are of-course ways to help yourself out here it often isn’t something your typical wordpress house will know how to implement or maybe unable too on the level of hosting provided.
A few weeks ago google starting putting live results into the search feed, firstly for twitter and then news. Essentially every public tweet and RSS feed about you and your product, if it’s newer than your content is more important. The internet is no longer a place of silos of websites, we all link and share information. Tools like Twitter, Facebook and web applications themselves now let us communicate live and unlimited data in a standard and understood way.
So now really is the time to be your own fan, if you or your employees have a personal blog, get them to talk about your products, even better get them to tweet good things and spread the word. Twitter these days is more like the keyword tag at the top of the page. Search engines such as google are very clever and feel they can pinpoint to a good enough standard what your page is about. However everybody needs a little help, the reason they as a company are so interested in what people say on twitter is that it’s unbiased. It’s a public, uncensored view of what you and your company sell or do.
So now is the time to act, tweet about what you do and or sell, put links in your tweets and look at twitter less of as something your company has an account on and you’re not sure why. Look it at as a completely free opportunity to tell people why they should be looking at something. Having a link to your twitter account on your website let’s google know to bind it to your site. That it is part of the ecosystem of your site and that things and information from it our live and should be read.
For example if you have a new product that would be great for a dad’s birthday, tell the world. Putting it up on your website and being arrogant about it doesn’t help anybody. Telling people “Don’t know what to get dad? Check this out [link]” takes you 5 minuets and helps people feel there is a person at the end of your website. Even better than this is to answer your critics.
Companies like the one I work for slipstream studio do a wonderful job of just that, organising your companies social PR. Monitoring the feed of information from various sources and giving a quick, on target response to the customer with issues. People often rage tweet, telling the world how much they hate X and Y about you. They are often shocked when out of the blue somebody asks how they can help or fixes there problem. There next tweet will often be about how much they now admire your customer support. Making the one before that forgotten and people thinking you are a wonderful place to buy from again.
Of course this is something you can do in-house, but when it comes to dealing with people and social reputation management, it’s best to let somebody like slipstream do that for you. Simply because they aren’t afraid to ask questions of you. If they find themselves repeating the same task over and over again then they can work with you to solve the problem, because they come to the table with experience in how the web should work as well as how customer service should. In these hard times I don’t think its wise for anybody to be in the dark about how there customer base feels about them. Even more importantly to try and correct it if there is bad feeling.
If you are a company and don’t know how to get started with twitter or any type of social platform then just ask, i’m here for you. I’m more than happy to help or answer any questions you have. Oh and for sanity of the world, go get your companies name on twitter before it’s too late!! You can always hand over the keys too it when you know what best to do with it. Even if its just to wish the customers you know use it a merry christmas, it’s a worthwhile exercise.
