Over time, the concept of social networking evolved, and in the present day scenario, Social Media has become equivalent to an open lottery ticket to boost up the popularity of your online business, blog or website.

This is why people are crazy about tweeting continuously on Twitter, forming communities on Facebook, and running multiple blogs to promote their businesses.

Social Media versus Search Engine Traffic

Sure thing, search engine traffic may be enough to achieve very high conversion rate theoretically, but when you consider practically, the search engine traffic isn’t too focused and doesn’t necessarily result in good conversion rate. For instance, if a person searches for “Apple iPods” and lands on your site after clicking on your advertisement on Google, he/she may not be necessarily interested in buying Apple iPods. There are good chances that such a visitor may have been looking for history of Apple iPods, or features of iPods to compare them with Zune. And, after looking at the info of interest, such a visitor may hit the back button, go to Amazon and buy a Zune! What a waste of your ad click and loss of business, isn’t it?

But, on the other hand, let us consider the traffic from Social Media like a Facebook group dedicated to Apple iPods as well as iPhone. Any visitor from such a Facebook group may definitely give you some business (at least there are higher chances as opposed to search engine traffic), even if it is purchase of a small iPod accessory.

More importantly, such visitors become frequent visitors and give you repeat business, while the search engine traffic is highly unpredictable and disoriented. A person who clicked on Google, landed on your site, bought a black 4GB Apple iPod nano, may not necessarily remember your site. And, next time around when such visitors need to purchase an iPhone, they may not bother to search your site on Google again.

Why Tweet Everyday?

You must have noticed even the best in business tweet everyday – what’s the big idea you ask! Well, tweeting daily has not just become a habit but also the preferred way to give constant updates to the potential customers, and maintain good business relationship with the existing customer-base. Every time when Google comes out with an update, AdSense Blog, AdWords blog and their corresponding Twitter pages are filled up with info, as they’re the best way to convey the info to the public rather than sending out millions of emails daily.

The Bottom-Line

So, if you want high conversion rate and boost up the profitability of your online business, you better realize the importance of social media and try to create your brand on Social Media. Form faithful Facebook groups, Tweet daily, blog daily and get more business – it is now as simple as that!

I’ve encountered reputation issues both positive and negative. I’ve also found both positive and negative commentaries across ALL industries and sectors. Even a plumbing supply company that suffered. Some companies have very positive coverage and end up with brand evangelists. So what can you do? How do you address this issue?

It’s important to note that most issues surrounding online reputation management fall out of social media sites on the Web (blogs, video blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Bebo, MySpace etc.) and rarely come from traditional media. PR agencies are well geared to deal with traditional media, but few understand how to work with social media, since the pshychology of people participating in social media applications takes a strange twist from the “real world.” My experience has shown that your marketing and communications people should be monitoring the Web and have a plan for response. Similar to how a company will have a Crisis Management plan in place for negative media coverage.

Dealing with negative information on the Web however, is a little more different. It is also more permanent in nature. A careful line has to be drawn with how much you push to manage the message. You can no longer control the message, but you can manage it. You should have a plan in place to have a response team or find an agency that has not just real-world PR experience, but Web communications experience and vice versa.

You can monitor yourself through tag cloud engines and by checking regular bloggers you know cover you, but a more effective route is to engage a company that has a software application to do broader and deeper searches. Make sure this company also has the ability to help you manage situations, otherwise you’ve only solved half the problem.

Noise? Well last night I got to thinking, How do Twitter users manage all the noise? Now to be more specific I will use Guy Kawasaki and Robert Scoble as an example.

So at the time of this blog post Guy followed more than 100,000 people on Twitter. Now how does one keep track of whats going on? How do you participate listening to more than 100,000 people ramble on about various things from a new software product to oh I’m washing my car.

Looking at people that follow 10,000 – 100,000 got me thinking, Is this sort of activity possibly brand damaging? If you follow too many and don’t manage followers expectations or participate as I will assume some expect, can you negatively impact your personal or corporate brand?

At some point yesterday Robert Scoble did some house cleaning, he went from following more than 90,000 people to around 1,000. Why would Robert Scoble do this, maybe to effectivly participate? Listening to 90,000 people must be difficult, trying to participate would be near impossible. There would be a point where you upset someone and what sort of negative impact does this have?

There are a lot of questions that could be asked here and really this blog post is turning into a lot of questions. It would be nice to hear from others what they think about this. Is following 10,000+ people just foolish or is there a method to their madness?