Today I’m recording a video webinar here in the UK for Revolution Magazine called “Search & Social Media – Friends or Foes?”
The premise behind the debate is whether Web 2.0 and social networking are overtaking “search” as the place to find answers to everyday questions.
Whether looking for a nice hotel in Jamaica, a recipe for banana bread or how to get chewing gum out of the carpet (!), more and more of us are asking questions or looking for answers on blogs or user forums rather than searching via a search engine.
But do we always find the answers we’re looking for? Sometimes?
The other day I was having a bit of trouble with some software (not Microsoft’s!) and used Live Search to look for some help. The top result was from a forum where someone who’d had a similar problem had asked the same question. A few folks had helped him out and I was able to fix my issue. Now I could have gone straight to the forum (if I had known it existed) and asked for help outright, but it was a search engine that pointed me in the right direction. The fact that search engines index helpful forums and blog posts mean that the answer is nearly always out there – you just have to ask!
Our view is that search and social media can exist quite happily together. The web has opened up some very rich channels of feedback, communication and opinion that never existed before, and the web is growing with more and more helpful information every day.
Some research we published recently here in Europe entitled Context Matters, showed that although social media engagement has increased hugely in the past couple of years, we do have to take into account the increases in search volume. As more and more people come online and broadband speeds enable users to spend more time and engage more on the internet, so people searching for answers via traditional search engines and social media has grown too.
It also depends on the context of the user – in my case I was at work and in a hurry to find an answer so I went to Live Search for a quick resolution. If I was planning my summer holiday I may take a little more time to research in the evenings and weekends, going onto a forum or reading someone’s blog relevant to the place where I was thinking of going.
PPC can help here too, as depending where people are in their decision making, engaging with them differently at different times of the week or even day can help keep the “conversation” or the social aspect of marketing your website alive and positive.
Here are some ice-breakers to think about when advertising on adCenter or any other paid search platform:
• If your business is closed at the weekend, consider a slightly different ad or landing page on Saturdays and Sundays explaining you’ll deal with their order or call them straight back on Monday. This will establish trust and show open communication that you value their custom.
• If you know you get a lot of bookings or sell a lot of products during lunchtime Monday-Friday, why not change your ad copy between 11am – 2pm with an offer or some copy saying “Booking in your lunch break? It takes just 10 mins with us!” or words to that effect.....
• People generally tend to research at the weekends so make sure your ad copy is reflecting the call to “browse” or “compare a range” or “research” making sure your landing page enables the user to do just that.
• Run a report on which demographics is interacting with your different products or services. Very often you may be surprised by which gender or even age-range is your most dominant customer. Use this intelligence to steer the conversation to make it more male or female orientated. Folk aged 50+ may not be into “street lingo” so try and be a little less “cool” in your copy!
These are just some ideas to get your creative juices flowing, but try and think about how you’d want to be spoken to if you were looking for your site and simply apply the same colour to the conversation.
You can register for the webinar here - it'll be broadcast on 30th April at 12 noon BST
Cheers
Mel