Social Media Marketing is Not SEO

I think we’ve all been guilty of the onslaught of social media information these past few months. A quick look on Sphinn even shows you how popular the subject has been within the majority of online marketing blog’s. Don’t get me wrong, Social Media Marketing can produce some great results for clients, but it certainly shouldn’t be used as a substitute for other marketing channels.

Positives of SMM

• Can send a large amount of traffic to a site over a short-time period
• Enables people to share information faster than ever before to the masses
• Backlinks can be gained by the thousands if a content-piece ‘gets out there’
• It allows anybody or anything to get on the map quicker than ever

Drawbacks to SMM

• You can’t guarantee results and success often relies on the participation of others
• It can take an awful long time and a lot of work before any results are seen
• For big companies it can appear to be ’spammy’ or ‘unethical’ and give them a bad name if not done correctly
• The Process of getting involved in communities and interacting with others is time consuming and when working for clients it can be hard to show where your work went

SMM & SEO Fuse Together

Those who understand both of these marketing sectors well, will understand that Social Media Marketing and SEO compliment each other in many ways. We certainly aren’t saying that they can’t be offered as seperate services, but to get the best bang for your online marketing efforts both should be considered and at least mildly utilised.

So how do / can they work together?

Blogging - Although blogging is a completely seperate thing on it’s own. It gives you a platform on which you can add viral / linkbait content that you can then have promoted around the web. Blogging was offered as an SEO tip to me nearly 2 years ago and I have been doing it ever since. It gives you more pages on a site that can be indexed by Search Engine’s and allows you to rank for less searched keywords but that can still drive a lot of traffic overall (long-tail).

Community Participation - Blog Commenting, Forum Posting and content creation on other sites not only helps you increase your brand online and helps leverage traffic from within the community but any links that you are getting on these sites are obviously also going to help with your link-building efforts. With this in mind you might want to check your on-site SEO is up to scratch so you are getting link-weight pointed at pages that have some form of decent web design structure (titles, meta-data, relevant content), and linking with relevant anchor text.

Keep Your Viral Content Relevant - One of the reasons SMM is so popular is that it can bring a massive amounts of backlinks to a content piece, for e.g. Google Webmaster Central reports over 450 backlinks for our post on the Top 50 StumbleUpon Users. If you are a company that offers something like ‘conservatory building’ or ‘window cleaning’ it can be difficult to think up some viral content. That still doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to create a piece on ‘The World’s Ugliest Dogs (and Owners)’, even though the backlinks might help generally it would be much better to stay in the home improvement / development niche when thinking about content. This can help with specific rankings for certain keywords as people often use link anchor text that is the same as the title of the story they are linking too and it’s likely to get more backlinks from the relevant niche.

In Conclusion

Social Media Marketing has been viewed as an easy way to build backlinks, it certainly doesn’t replace making titles unique, setting up a nice internal linking structure and cleaning up those duplicate pages. Who would really benefit from links pointing at a page with the title ‘Home’ or ‘Company Name’? If you want to read more on the subject stay right here on our Social Media blog, or check out some of our favourite blogs on the subject which include Social Desire, Collective Thoughts, Blogstorm and the Ignite Blog.