Does social media trump SEO? I can already see the flames I’m going to be getting from SEO’ers out there. They’re holding on to a sinking ship. I’m not saying SEO is necessarily dead, just that Social media will swallow it up. Good social media translates into higher SEO rankings – but you can’t say the same thing about good SEO practices.
1. My Twitter Profile’s PR is 6
Basically what I’m saying here is that any link I post to twitter is getting some good link love, because the PR for my personal twitter profile is 6. This is different from Twitter.com’s pagerank. This is also true for every profile you create – they won’t all be the same PR but they will give some link love to whatever links you share on them.
2. Social Nets get Googled
Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc show up in search engines. Higher ranked, shared, and retweeted posts and articles can result in more traffic from search engines. Also youtube videos show up in search results and can help to increase the overall rank of your website.
3. Social is a Virus
Social media can easily spread like wildfire. You put out one good piece of content – and it gets shared 50-100 times by friends, and contacts. Their friends also share it and eventually you get upwards of 300-500 shares. That’s 300-500 individual links on social sharing sites like digg, reddit, stumbleupon, twitter, facebook, and more.
The alternate is writing 300-500 articles and submitting them to article directories, getting 1 backlink per article, and being satisfied with that. Now which is better? Write 1 article and get 300 backlinks, or write 300 articles for 300 backlinks? I think it’s pretty obvious which is less of a headache.
4. Social Media is “im-media-te”
Social media marketing happens the instant new content is pushed and shared. SEO can take a lot longer to work – mostly because anything faster would send alarms up at google and other search engines.
5.Greater potential for Authority Status
You used to write some good articles relating to your niche and people would find them on Ezinearticles.com and think – ok this guy knows his stuff. He must be an expert. Zoom into today – now we have seo experts outsourcing article writing to people in developing nations. These people write ‘OK’ english, but it’s not great. The quality of posts suffers, and the content just isn’t as top notch as it used to be.
Face it – as much content as is produced now-a-days we need to cipher through the garbage as fast as possible to find what we’re really looking for. Enter: Social Media. You post a tweet saying “Need a good recipe for Apple Turnovers”, immediately your friends tweet back links to some of their favorite recipes. These are people you generally trust and chat with frequently – both online and offline.
Having a bridge of trust already built makes these warm contacts much more likely to like what you share, and vice versa. By sharing great articles with your social network you can become an authority, and then your friends will recommend you, and so on – creating a much more stable, honest and trustworthy network of authority. This also applies to increasing brand awareness and credibility.
6. Search is going social
Even the search engines are making a go at social media. Google recently launched Google Buzz which integrates with gmail and other google properties. Google has a starring mechanism added to search results which are for personal starring of results – but could positively or negatively effect search results one day.
Both Bing and Google have real-time search results from twitter, youtube, and more. It’s very possible with all the social media api’s that are built – that the next generation of google’s algorithm will evolve to measuring the social impact of a link and using more of a social way of choosing which links are more authoritative on a subject.
Can you provide a good rebuttal? Be my guest – Lets get the conversation going and see who wins the fight: Social Media or SEO.
Guest author Patrick Curl is a social media marketer with MarketingOC (Orange County) founded by Brian Fluhr who’s the CEO. Together their primary business focuses are: Local Marketing, Mobile Marketing, and Social Media Marketing. Image by HubSpot shared under CC license. You can also guest blog on QOT and share your social media tips.