Social Media marketing is made up of strange relationships. The weirdest of notions have the ability to catch on and go viral provided they fulfil two simple criteria: they are easy to use and they offer a means to be personal. Twitter, Facebook Foursquare and Skype are classic examples. Throw in fulfilling a need, in the mix, and you are onto a winner.
When Microsoft trumped Facebook and Google and bought Skype it bought one of the web’s most successful properties in terms of global user numbers and, arguably, one of the most recognisable. Microsoft’s intention is to leverage Skype’s 600 million users and gain a foothold on the social network scene while at the same time applying its own enterprise programming principles to a utility that’s used by tens of thousands of mid-size firms across the US and hundreds of thousands across the globe, as their VoiP service of choice.
We can debate Microsoft’s inability to get out of its corporate mentality endlessly but this is not the province of this blog. HelpMySEO looks at the practicalities from an end-user point of view and the reason we are looking at Microsoft’s Skype acquisition is to question whether it holds any promise for the social network marketer.
It is a little early to tell but given Microsoft’s streamlining of everything it does into enterprise computing programs it is highly unlikely that they will manage to ‘think outside the box’ long enough to actually come up with a use for Skype which will really help the VoiP telephony service become anything than a lame duck.
I am not the only one thinking that apparently. A quick search this morning on Google for ‘Skype News’ delivered articles in online IT magazines which details ‘Skype alternatives’, a search term that seems to have started trending ever since Microsoft got involved with Skype.
Bottom line, if you are using Skype for your online business and you have liked its free, stable service, you may want to start thinking about finding an alternative as a back-up. If you experimented with Skype’s integration with Facebook profiles which allowed you to pull in your Facebook friends to Skype contacts and are wondering whether it might become a potent Social Media tool, best leave that thought on the backburner and concentrate, instead, on your current online marketing efforts and the search engine optimization (SEO) strategy you have been implementing on your website.
