With The End Of Bebo, Should Your Company Be Bothered About Alternative Social Networks?

The closure of the social network Bebo has been well reported but not particularly mourned. It was bought in 2008 by AOL but they have not been able to grow 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 basic problem with any social network is that it needs to attract advertising to bankroll the service. Bebo was originally aimed at 18-24 year olds, a popular target audience for many businesses. However most of its participants proved to be younger, and now they are switching allegiance to rival networks, especially Facebook, which participants think is a more mature service. Facebook is the largest social service with a broad user base. Does that mean that companies should direct some of the online marketing budget that could be spent on search optimization or other marketing towards Facebook?

The influence of the social networks on search engine positioning through customer review sites appears to be getting stronger but it is not something that can be controlled. For many participants, being social is why they use the network: responding to advertising is not. The effectiveness of purchased advertising on these services must be disappointing. Even Facebook is just breaking even, so despite its size its continued existence cannot be assumed can disappear, so can another, to be replaced by something totally new. Customer review sites could turn up anywhere.

For most businesses, it makes sense to concentrate on improving the organic search engine positioning. search engine optimisation will have a long-term effect on the placement of your enterprise’s domain, no matter what happens to the social networks. There are many potential buyers for whom the social networks are an irrelevance. These clients will be using a search to find a product and are not concerned with entries from these sites. Applying search optimization processes to make minor mechanical adjustments to the website to highlight titles can help to make the site more noticeable on results pages to potential buyers. Your search engine optimisation professional should make a careful consideration of the keywords likely to be tried for a search request so that they can be made more noticeable in site content and page titles to draw potential buyers and the search engines.

The publicising of your enterprise’s domain through the publication of documents for dispersal across the web will still be a major component of search optimization. This increases awareness of your website and highlights its significance with the search engines, which will help raise its results placement. Many potential buyers will make a selection from an organic search engine result listed on page one or two of the results, ignoring any references to bought advertising. This sort of optimization is not affected by reactions from social network review groups.

The loss of a social network is nothing to be concerned about. search engine optimisation will help to raise the organic search engine positioning of your enterprise’s domain and reach potential buyers no matter what happens to the social services.