Social Media Consultants?

Over the last year there has been a lot of discussion in the news about Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and Myspace and other social networking sites. In the wake of this there has been an influx of new businesses calling themselves Social Media Consultants. Is Social Media the new SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)? Should you be paying someone to tell you how to promote your site on social media?

At Best Served Cold we like to keep up with new trends and ideas – over the years we have signed up to hundreds of new sites – and we’ve been using sites like Digg, Reddit and Mixx for a number of years to help promote our new releases. Recently we’ve been experimenting with Twitter and Plurk and have a couple of clients who are trying YouTube as a way to gain traffic and interest.

SEO vs. Social Media

Well, that’s a bit of a leading title. It’s not a case of versus, it’s more a case of what to use and when best to use it. There is still and will probably always be a need for good SEO on a website. Along with Accessibility (the two go hand in hand) it’s one of the building blocks of a good website and needed to ensure your site gets indexed and found on search engines for the topic you want.

Social media is a broad term for a lot of different sites. It started with social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and social rating sites like Technorati. Closely followed by social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace the term has finally come to include all sites that allow communal interaction around a topic, personal accounts or news.

Modern websites are often built around a Content Management System (CMS) and as such will often have some from of social media built in – usually comments or a rating system – but to get the best results you need to look at other websites to see what they can offer you.

To take full advantage of the social media revolution a company has to consider how to get people talking about their products and services on other websites, do they write a blog, set up a YouTube account, do they Twitter, create Social Media News Releases or need a FaceBook page? There are a lot of options and it’s not always easy to understand the advantages one site has over another.

That’s where Social Media Consultants come in, they can advise about what’s best for your company and which sites you need to be joining. It’s not rocket science and with a bit of time most people would be able to figure it out themselves but, like SEO, it’s much easier to get someone else to do it!

Best Served Cold have been working with social media for a number of years and have a wide knowledge of what works and doesn’t work on various websites. If you’d like an introduction to social media and SEO for your site why not contact us. We can review your site and business and work with you to improve and build a social network of your own and, if needed, give advice on how to improve your SEO while you’re at it.