March 10th, 2010 by Nick

What is social media marketing (SMM)?

SMM is a collective term which refers to social networks, online communities, blogs and other online media which can be utilised for the purposes of marketing, sales and PR. Examples are Twitter, Linkedln, Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia, Orkut and YouTube.

The definitive aspect of all of these online media is that the content is uploaded by users, rather than the organisation or its employees. This makes SMM an economic winner, because other people are creating content for you.

How sharing helps SEO

Online communities thrive – indeed exist upon – the sharing between individuals within that community. That means voting, commenting and linking on sites and between sites, which creates the pathways that search engine spiders look for, remember and re-visit.

The more popular a social media site is, the more traffic, exposure and sharing it will encourage, and the higher up in rankings it will come.

Social media marketing is based on the essentials of SEO – true or false?

Some people would argue that the reason social media marketing is so beneficial for SEO is because social media marketing is built up of the very essentials that SEO lives and dies by.

This includes content and keywords. If you deconstruct a blog, what do you end up with but content and keywords?

The community that drives and encourages sharing and interaction by users is also generating nothing else but content. Content which begets more content – a blog which invites comments which invites more postings which invites comments from another site… to a search engine spider this reads like this: relevance, authority, links. Not only do online communities attract search engine spiders and users in the first instance, but if their on-page SEO is up to scratch and they have a positive experience on the site, then both groups will return.

It would therefore seem fair to say that SMM does share many of the defining characteristics of SEO, whether by accident or design.

How SMM can lead to better link building

SMM can offer SEO the content that is required for good on-page SEO but also the links that are needed for healthy off-page search engine optimization.

This is because a well-executed social media marketing campaign will attract lots of inbound links, which is fundamental for SEO. The beauty of using SMM to improve link building is that the links will be created through a natural process, rather than having been bought or given in reciprocation.

Is relying on social media sites to create your reputation risky business?

While positive references on social media sites will work to boost your ratings, there is also a chance that your search engine ratings might be higher based on the references that weren’t so positive. Consider this: comments on a particular video related to your business on YouTube lead to the video ranking high on Google’s first page when relevant keywords are typed in. Fantastic! But that only depends on the content of said video. If that video clip was less than flattering, or actually damaging, then you might regard the power of social media sites as less positive. Online reputation management is a part of search engine optimisation which can help to back up your authority online and with search engines.

Link to us

If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.