Do You Need to Optimize for Social Networking

If you have been reading Randy Ray’s Poker SEO blog of late you will have noticed that he has made a whole series of posts on optimizing for social networks.

While a lot of his advice is pure gold, the one thing I worry about is people taking the whole social networking for poker websites too seriously. I am going to have to do more research into the topic myself, but I am going to outline some of my concerns with some of the techniques Randy describes in his posts.

SEO for Social Networking Sites

If you take a look at the Social Media Optimization for Poker Websites article he wrote he gives some great advice in the 8 points he made.

In one of them he says start out by getting great at one of the networks. But some of the other ideas tend to be vague and easier said than done. In point 2 he says be somebody. Well that all sounds great in theory.

Let’s assume that we are doing the social network sites one a time to do it properly and get the most out of it. We want to “be somebody” at each of the sites. I don’t know about anyone else but at a forum it usually takes around 6 months to be known as someone trustworthy.

With social media sites, there are literally hundreds of thousands of people doing a similar thing. If I decide that I want to optimize my poker website for Twitter, how long is that going to take? Will it be worth it? Could my efforts be better spent somewhere else?

If I optimize effectively for Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Facebook and the whole host of other websites to become an identity, that could be an awefully long time. If you decide that Twitter doesn’t work for you, how do you know the others won’t? So you take the time to optimize for Delicious and then you don’t get much out of that either. In all that time you spent you could have written tens of pages for other affiliates to receive solid links.

I know that I am focusing on the negatives here and could be blowing things out of proportion. But if optimizing for Facebook involves signing up other affiliates for their stupid self promoting pages, then I don’t see the value. It will have value for the people you already know and are respected by. But, what if you don’t know me from a bar of soap? Am I really going to start commenting on your photos of your family and take an interest in your life so you can help spread the word about something?

I would much rather be genuine and “social.” Joining groups and spending a lot of time just for the sake of networking doesn’t make much sense to me.

While I know Randy is just telling us how to optimize for social media sites and he isn’t really implying we drop everything and go for it. I am struggling to understand why someone would want to be apart of all these communities, becoming an identity. Obviously if you can do it correctly then it could pay off hansomely.

But I ask the question – Why not put these same efforts into helping and forging strong relationships with other affiliates. IMO that will get you much further AND offer a gateway into social media a lot quicker should you decide to take that road.

Maybe I am ignorant and uninformed. I will have to run my own tests.