Having spent the last five years trying to get my e-business off the ground I\’ve heard a lot of talk about social media and how we must all get involved but is it really all it\’s cracked up to be or just a complete waste of time.

I\’ve found some really big opportunities in blogging but I\’m still not yet sure about media such as Facebook and Twitter. Certainly professional networking site such as LinkedIn don\’t work for my niche, that is as a purveyor of free information.

Let me qualify what I mean by blogging. I\’m not referring to actually running a blog such as a WordPress or Blogspot site, I\’m referring to using an xml feed to “pump out” information to readers interested in my ramblings on a chronological basis. In other words, any reader who has subscribed to my feed will automatically get an alert when there\’s a new page on my site.

All my traffic comes from organic searches on the internet search engines so the latest updates are important to get out there as far and wide as possible so to that end I\’ve linked up my xml feed to Google Feedburner and this ensures that all my updates are automatically fed through to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter but does this actually provide any benefit?

The issue for me is that my site revenue is based around attracting visitors and readers. Just like a newspaper, the more readers I have the more chance I have of securing advertizing revenue and as the site grows I can (hopefully) charge more for that advertizing space. The “marketing” of my site ie. the way that I attract readers is:-

1. To write quality information that people are going to want to read and come back for more
2. To ensure that my pages are at the top of the search engine rankings
3. To use social media to pump out links to my web pages in the hope that someone will be sufficiently attracted to want to click.

What I\’ve learned so far is that social media is completely different to blogging in that it\’s a two way process. Just pumping out the information like I\’ve been doing is not very productive and therefore for my type of business I still have mixed feelings.

Having said that I have used some of the contacts that I\’ve made in other areas of my life. Organising charity events and fund raisers for my kids school are two great examples. The social medium is a way to communicate rather than just a supply of information and that communication is definitely a two way process.

In conclusion I think that social media marketing can work for your business but you have to be committed to working with it and spending time doing it. You can just dabble at it, tweet once a day for example and expect business to come pouring it.

Taking Twitter as a case in point, you\’ve got to be Tweeting regularly about what your business is doing (this may spark interest from one of your followers) and you\’ve got to be actively following others, be interested in their tweets and respond when the time\’s right. This sparks the conversation and is the pre-cursor to a meeting.

As a supplier of information, I don\’t want to be engaging in long conversations, I haven\’t got time and they don\’t generate additional revenue (because they don\’t deliver more site traffic). If my business was based on selling goods or services face by face then yes, social media is something that I\’d want to be involved in.

Author Bio: Paul Yates writes about social media marketing and is a regular uses of the social network Twitter. He also has spent time learning about using Twitter effectively.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: social media marketing,social media,xml feed,media marketing