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Marta Wohrle
The New York Times made a decision recently. It was about the same time as I made one of my own. Funny though, how drastically we diverged from that point on.
The NYT decision was to ban the word “tweet” on the grounds that it isn’t proper English, even if (in the words of Phil Corbett, the Times’ exacting new standards editor) it made the paper look “Paleolithic.” Just a tad, old bean.
Meanwhile, my decision was to up the tweets—um, spontaneous short (140 character) messages on an Internet platform known as Twitter. NB: Mr. Corbett insists that the Internet should be capitalized as if it were a strange and far-off country. Anyhow, allow me to explain my decision, because there is a bit more to it than that.
For the last two years the strategy for my Web site, Truth In Aging, has been fairly simple and arguably even somewhat traditionalist: Create content, try to create really good content, try to create a critical mass of content in my chosen niche (beauty product reviews). Once there was something approaching a critical mass, we fine-tuned our search engine optimization. Thanks to the insight of a great little company called Raspberry Red, the SEO efforts and a new design with better navigation doubled the site’s traffic. So far, so good.
But then, the site’s metrics plateaued. They weren’t going down, but nor were they growing. Increasingly, people were talking about how it had become hard (to the point of impossible) to see growth for sites in the mid- to long tail. It was official—the Web was fragmented. And then along came May Day.
For Web sites in the long tail, May Day was one dog of a day. To cut a long story short, Google last month changed the way it indexes “long-tailed” queries, or queries in which a user enters multiple key words. It has caused the displacement of countless numbers of Web sites from Google’s search index, and message boards started to fill up with stunned publishers who had just seen their traffic cut in half.
My Web site’s page ranking halved. Fortunately, the traffic has held up. But it is a salutary reminder not be beholden to the vagaries of Google. As I have just launched a second site, Truth In Slimming, it seems it is time to get moving on something that had been on my mind for a while: Step up my social media strategy.
Like everyone else, we have our Facebook fan pages and our regular tweets (that word again), but it is now time to dial down—just a little—new content creation and divert resources into really pushing out our presence on social media. We are already getting a sense of the work that is involved. Having a Twitter or Facebook account doesn’t equate to a social media strategy any more than having a phone means that I’m in telemarketing. And despite Facebook’s sheer size in terms of registered users, there are many games in town—Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare, Digg, Delicious...
A new mantra is starting to be muttered: Social is the new search. If that seems like hyperbole or wishful thinking on behalf of those publishers bruised and battered by a Google algorithm, then consider that USA Today’s Web site gets more referrals from social networks than search, as does CNN.com (source: Compete, April 2010).
Huffington Post gets slightly more referrals from Facebook than from Google and has seen its traffic grow much faster than any other online news source, including the New York Times. Now that’s something to tweet about. Or it would be if Twitter weren't down again.
Minsider columnist Marta Wohrle is president of Accord Media and the publisher of Truth In Aging, among other digital content titles. Previously she was SVP, digital media, Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., and director of Mercer Management Consulting.
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