SEO or Social Media?

Search Engine Optimisation helps your business to increase leads via search engines from their free organic listings. Social Media meanwhile helps you to increase leads through social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Social Networks and Search Engines also offer the opportunity for businesses to promote themselves through advertisements.

Both social media and SEO are two online popular marketing channels. The channels you select depend on your business and marketing budget. Although social media is at times excluded from business-to-business (B2B) companies, it is still a suitable channel - if executed correctly. The crucial point is to choose the right social network to start promoting yourself on. For instance, social networks such as LinkedIn are more effective for B2B customers. On the other hand, business-to-consumer (B2C) customers will find that Facebook and Twitter would be more effective for their purposes. Still B2B companies find Facebook and Twitter to fit in with their online marketing campaigns. Company blogs are still a central point for both social media and SEO and are effective in attracting customers for both B2C and B2B companies.

Your Online Content

For online marketing, you need content from blog posts, documents, articles, videos, images, webinars, and lots more that the web has to offer. The content created can then be used to attract potential customers to your website. The great aspect about content is that the same content can be used for both Social Media and SEO. Indeed, a typical blog post that is indexed by search engines may actually direct traffic on your site. At the same time, you may update your social media followers about your new blog post, hence keeping them exposed to your company and increasing their interest in following you online.

Search engine optimisation (SEO), which increases traffic from organic listings, can to some extent run without content. However, you will still need a good site architecture and offerings pages on your website. What this means is that you can do without extra content such as a company blog. Still, by doing so, you will be missing a lot of opportunities while making SEO more difficult. Social Media requires content and is completely useless without it. If you frequently update your website with fresh content, you will be helping SEO by keeping search engines interested in your site (and targeting further keywords). On the contrary social media requires daily or frequent updates. A social media update posted today will be buried in the users' feed within 24 hours or even less. However, content on search engines tends to survive longer. A blog post indexed by search engines will keep returning traffic as long as your site has high visibility on search engines. High rankings are required due to the habit of having users only checking and clicking on the top few search results.

When compared to SEO, Social Media lets you build more relationships by interacting directly with an audience and customers. In return, besides attracting traffic and leads this relationship will result in brand awareness and an increased trust towards the company. A potential buyer seeing your brand with decent online interaction will be further convinced to proceed with the transaction. Having a company presence on social media is also important to have a piece of the pie. There are numerous sites that allow users to submit their review or opinion on a particular product, service, or even company. Eighty percent of consumers are influenced by such user-generated content. By having a social media presence you will have control of some 'real estate' on these networks with which you can positively affect your audience.

SEO is suitable for every website on the web. Everybody uses search engines to find information online, and hence both B2B and B2C customers can benefit. Social Media is also beneficial but some efforts may be focused more into one direction. Depending on the budget, the company may also opt to speed up the process by buying advertisements targeting users on search engines or on a particular social network.

Conrad Bugeja is a Search Optimisation Consultant and Pay-Per-Click Consultant at Alert eBusiness Internet Marketing Division - www.alertemarketing.com 

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