With The Closing Of Bebo, Should Your Company Be Worried About Other Social Networks?
The closure of the social network Bebo has been widely reported but not particularly mourned. It was bought in 2008 by AOL but they have not been able to expand the service. In its five years of existence, Bebo has never managed to find great numbers of users in the USA. Its biggest audience has been in the UK, but its number of users has fallen to a third of its best. Despite the efforts of AOL, they have not been able to find a new operator for the service.
The fundamental problem with any social network is that it needs to attract advertising to finance the service. Bebo was originally aimed at 18-24 year olds, a popular target audience for many companies. However most of its users proved to be younger, and now they are transferring allegiance to rival networks, typically Facebook, which users think is a more mature service. Facebook is the largest social service with a broad user base. Does that mean that companies should target some of the online advertising budget that could be spent on search optimization or other advertising towards Facebook?
The impact of the social networks on search engine positioning through customer review sites seems to be getting stronger but it is not something that can be managed. For many users, being social is why they use the network: reacting to advertising is not. The effectiveness of bought advertising on these services must be disappointing. Even Facebook is just breaking even, so despite its dominance its continued existence cannot be guaranteed. If one social disappear, so can another, to be replaced by something totally new. Customer review sites could turn up anywhere.
For most companies, it makes sense to concentrate on improving the organic search engine positioning. search engine optimisation will have a long-term influence on the ranking of your organisation’s website, no matter what happens to the social services. There are many potential clients for whom the social networks are an irrelevance. These clients will be using a search to find a service and are not concerned with references from these sites. Applying search optimization techniques to make minor mechanical improvements to the website to emphasise titles can help to make the site more noticeable on results pages to potential clients. Your search engine optimisation consultant should make a careful examination of the keywords likely to be used for a search request so that they can be made more noticeable in site content and page titles to attract potential clients and the search engines.
The publicising of your organisation’s website through the composition of articles for dissemination across the web will still be a major component of search optimization. This improves awareness of your website and highlights its relevance with the search engines, which will help improve its results ranking. Many potential clients will make a selection from a natural search engine result ranked on page one or two of the results, ignoring any references to bought advertising. This form of optimization is not affected by reactions from social network comment groups.
The closure of a social network is nothing to be worried about. search engine optimisation will help to improve the organic search engine positioning of your organisation’s website and reach potential clients no matter what happens to the social services.