9 Reasons you NEED social media marketing in 2009

1. Your competition is doing it.
Most of the competition that’s doing it, you didn’t even know was your competition – UNTIL they started showing up for your best converting search phrases. Why are they showing up you ask? Well, they’re leveraging social media to build global link popularity and brand awareness. You’re customers know who they are now, and know that they’re faster, smaller, more efficient, and will keep them happy. They’ve implemented the technology to minimize overhead, and are treating customers better.

2. Your customers are using it (though maybe indirectly)
No matter how non-technical your customers are – social media impacts their consumption decisions. Social media’s impact on traditional media is increasing on a daily basis. Newspapers, television, and radio, are realizing that digg, reddit, and twitter, are sometimes even faster than the AP newswire. This impacts which news is presented in a traditional sense. The geeks, webmasters, the trendsetters, and other folks who are on the bleeding edge are now watching social media outlets and republishing to the channels that your customers are consuming from.

3. Your vendors and partners are using it
You know who’s NOT using facebook, twitter, digg, delicious, reddit, myspace, stumbleupon, and other large traffic social networks well? Automakers and Banks. Luckily, they can get billion dollar bailouts.

Try getting your modem rebooted over the phone with comcast – then ping @comcastcares You can thank them and I for the time savings later.

Has your site been on the homepage of digg or reddit? Has your site been stumbled? Do you know what it is? Do you think your no overhead web based competition from the Silicon Valley knows what it is?

4. More Social = more Search.
More Search = More Customers.
More customers = More business.
Duh. The web is more de-centralized than ever. After we do our initial searches through the Google, we start looking for communities of likeminded people. Your best customers are the ones that are passionate and want to have a conversation about you, your product, or something related (news, pictures, whatever). You need to be there to have the conversation WITH your customers. Otherwise, they will have it behind your back. You might not be able to rank right away on search engines anymore, but you can get to the top of a news or industry specific site for a few days with good content.

5. Paid search prices are rising.
PPC consulting is still a great solution to improving your ROI, and decreasing your CPC – but the market is getting tougher. It is great to be able to buy your keyword phrase to your targeted audience – but everyone is becoming wise to that fact. Those awesome high conversion, high profit keywords are slowly having the ROI sucked out of them by rising click prices. This makes organic search a must have long term proposition. Any self-respecting search marketer is going to tell you that you need natural links. And the best place to get natural links is???!?!?! You guessed it Chachi – Social media linkbaiting.

6. SEO isn’t easy anymore
Man do I miss the days of buying run of site text links and ranking top for any search term. Like Jim, I would never buy links anymore (okay, maybe I’d TRADE for them if it was SUPER relevant). The days of the little guys ranking well in google is slowly coming to an end, and a glorious era will go down in history. Pretty soon, however, it will be big business as usual. Those same big businesses have a while to catch on to social media FOR SEO, but they’ll do that eventually too. Personalized search is the next big thing (and yes it’s now REALLY almost here). You need lots of people coming to your site, staying on your site, and bookmarking your site for later to prove that you deserve to be on top of the search results.

7. You can’t buy links anymore
The communists have won the war. We have declared defeat. Of course if you listen to SEO’s and search engineers for too long, you will think that there are NO links that pass value. Well, at least we can pay to create viral content, and pay for optimization in the distribution channel, and HOPE that people link to us. The content kings have one, and it’s time to get writing. You might as well start talking to your customers and actually giving them what they want. Since bounce rate is now a significant factor for search results, it’s gonna hurt you to dupe your users with crap content anyhow.

8. Your website is only a billboard
You can have the most beautiful website in the world, and without traffic, it might as well be a billboard in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa. Just ask all those big corporations who paid millions to have their beautiful flash sites built, and forgot to hire a SEO. You launched your site, and now you need traffic, or it’s been there for a long time, and you need MORE traffic and exposure. You listened to the search engines, and created great content! (after all, content is king!) But you still don’t seem to have much traction, and only your Aunt Frita, Uncle Merv, and 6 other people are visiting your site every day.

9. Great ROI on the Marketing Budget
With the DIY route and use social tools, social media marketing is the grass roots, word of mouth wonder of the web. Social media is building future communication empires at the moment with the likes of facebook, digg, reddit, digg, delicious, as the distribution points for web communication. They are the portals that every dot-bust era strived to be. Social media is seperating the old guard from the new, and rewarding those that are quick to embrace the technology. Do you?

Bonus #10: It’s a distribution point.

Social media is a way to reliably disperse your message to a group of people who want to hear what you have to say. When you have something good to say – you TELL them through your selected channels. At minimum, companies are becoming aware that they need to have conversations with their customers somehow.

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