Is Social Media Marketing A Better Option Than Sem And Seo For Business Promotion?

Is Social Media Marketing a better method for promotion of business?

Are you having more success using social media to promote your business as opposed to SEO and SEM?

 

That's a tough question to answer. People receive different results with different avenues. I use both SEO and Social Media to achieve results. I build my list with low competition keywords and SEO, and Social media for engagement and relationship building. Actually, I would not give up either. Truth be told, I do best with email marketing, but since the list is built mostly with SEO....If I had to choose I would say SEO is bringing me better successes.

 

Blessed with minimal budget and expertise, Social Media has been my go-to. Unbelievably easy reach and effectiveness with reasonable effort, in fact I personally view it as "guerrilla marketing" via everything from Yahoo Answers to 4chan.org.

 

Especially for Facebook, my answer is yes. But you still need SEO effort to make your business more boosted. A combination between Facebook and SEO is an ultimate warrior for business promotion.

 

I too use both. My online income comes primarily 2 different sources. For my locally based offline business, I find that Facebook and LinkedIn have been the most productive avenues. I have also found FB useful for promoting niche sites, but primarily concentrate on SEO for those.

 

That's highly relevant on your business model. SEO applied correctly can bring you tons of leads and conversions Social Media allows you to interact more and build your brand and trust. I would say that any successful marketing campaign would make use of both these elements as well as Advertising to gain maximum exposure and traffic.

 

I completely agree with the points above. I also use both SEO and Social Media to achieve results.

While networking and relationship-building takes time, it's a very effective way to keep your business and your content on the minds of people who might be interested in linking to you. Like Linkedln, LinkedIn is an excellent source to develop relationships that can benefit your business. We must target certain individuals that we know can help grow our company to interact with their communities or reach out to them.

 

Social media is a key element of SEO these days. Google / Matt Cutts etc have made it clear that social is a factor which comes into play with Serps. So, FB, twitter, YouTube etc - a presence here will help your website rankings.

However, a seperate issue is how utilising these social media channels brings in direct traffic for your business - and here it will depend in large part on your business. I have acted for financial services firms where there has been no real benefit in investing significant amounts of time and media on social media. Yes, we have set up FB and Twitter accounts for them, and linked them up to their websites, but the main reason was for clients who were "social media savvy" (most weren't!!) to share/like/follow the company in question.

However, some businesses lend themselves much more to social media / online networking than others. Another example is a real estate company I worked with. The company actively bought into social media - they set up a FB group and page, heavily promoted it, and found several clients directly from their efforts. They also were heavily involved with Youtube videos - pictures/videos of high end villas by the sea - real eye candy - which again were very successful. And an added bonus - Google recognised the effort the business was putting into social media - and it really helped their ranking for their chosen keywords for their main website.

I also fully agree with the poster above who mentioned that social media is a great way for a company to interact with existing clients/prospects - which builds on existing relationships. It's a great communication method, where more and more people would prefer to deal with just one platform - FB, or twitter, or whatever - rather than go to numerous different company websites.

 

Specially for facebook, my answer is yes. But you still need SEO effort to make your business more boosted. A combination between Facebook and SEO is an ultimate warrior for business promotion.

 

Looking back on 2012 it becomes very clear that was the year when getting traffic swung from getting backlinks, to getting likes, followers, and other social signals.

Even prior to 2012, the brighter SEO's could see the way Google was going: but the Panda and Penguin updates made things super clear.

Enough prominent websites got hit by one or other of these updates – even the mighty Ezine Articles got hit badly - to show the future of backlinking.

The answer is clear: try not to rely on Google for your traffic.

Google is definitely taking Twitter into account in its ranking now, and you be a fool to think it won't be taking the content of your Google plus stream into account quite soon. And them taking Facebook and the other social sites into account can't be far behind. But they are looking for real conversations: as are the social sites themselves. So this is no time to fake it.

As in 2008 when Google updates hit thousands of scammy Adsense sites, Google has spun on a dime once more and the message is clear.

Get posting in forums relevant to your niche and give people lots of help; put up great quality content on your own sites and any other quality sites you can (after making sure your Google authorship has been set up), and post everything you can to your Twitter account, Facebook, Google plus, LinkedIn as appropriate.

Best to go through these one at a time filling in your profile and getting to know the platform well, so you can look good, rather than trying to cover them all at once and doing a half decent job on all of them.

2013 is the year to start spending much more of your time helping people on social networks and getting positive social signals. Funnily enough, Google is going to like this more and more and will rank you higher.

Malc