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A fresh observation on the power of social media

Olney Snow Feb 2 2009 Church & street pikniked
Image by joolney via Flickr

Ten weeks of a hyperlocal social network

Olney100, the site we are running for the town of Olney in north Buckinghamshire continues to power ahead.  We are shooting up the Alexa Rankings.  At 32 000 for the UK, we’ve outstripped the local gov.uk sites and are rapidly closing on the local football (soccer) team.

I am carefully watching equivalent sites around England and we seem to be in the front pack.  That said, we are still small enough to pour over Google Analytics in some detail and a little example helped me frame the value of social media quite simply.  It went like this.

A simple case study of  the value of social media to small businesses

Somebody was searching for “welsh rarebit outside catering”.   If you aren’t from the UK, you may need to know that a welsh rarebit is like a toasted cheese sandwich without the top piece of bread.

This highly specific search led the surfer from the third page of Google results to of our local deli’s.    The phrase “welsh rarebit” was no longer visible, but being a young site, I’m able to recall that a welsh rarebit was mentioned in a conversation about British Breakfast week that took place over a month ago.

This example illustrates the immense value of social media which I summed up this way.

Tell me, I know for a minute and no one else knows.

Tell me on social media and Google remembers forever.  Months later someone else will overhear your conversation with me and knock on your website to find out more.

ROI of social media for small businesses

Social media can add hugely to the effective advertising of a small business.   As far as I know, no one is tracking these effects.

  1. Small businesses are extremely busy and they will never have time to update a flat website at the speed they can use social networks.  With Ning, Facebook, blogs and Twitter, they are able to post several times a day in a casual style.  Posting is easy and what appears on top is fresh, current & relevant.   Metric: frequency of updating.
  2. The trace left on Google provides a third internet presence: flat, network and trace.  Metric: total presence on the internet.
  3. The range of topics they cover with the quick fast posting in social media embraces their often very diverse offerings in what scholars might call rich descriptions.  Metric: diversity of content.
  4. They use natural language which is also likely to be used by ordinary customers when they search with Google.  We might use commonly searched words as tags.  But we have no way of knowing how much traffic is lost overall to the less searched phrases.  Over time, the small business can expect substantial traffic from conversations they had with other customers that was store, quite incidently, by Google.  Money for jam, in other words.   Metric:  traffic from the trace rather than SEO.

I cn’t imagine how much conventional advertising it would have taken to generate this lead.

Of course, the next level is to make it easy for surfers landing on their social network page to contact them and to show that the conversion rate is higher than it would be with  a flat website.

A simple 3 step rubric to help users network better

As many people in Olney are not very familiar with social networking and still see the internet as an extension of “Disgruntled from Tunbridge Wells”, this little win prompted me to circulate this three point rubric.

Use your real name! Customers cannot find ye who hide!

Have real conversations with real people!  Months later people will ‘overhear’ your conversation on Google and come looking for you to find out more.

Wear your heart on your sleeve! Say what you want to be known for.

And my next post will be on something that is a problem for hyperlocal sites - the debris on the internet.

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