How Are Social Media Marketing and SEO Related?

Vu Khoi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

Social Media Marketing and SEO are two very important areas you need to master in order to develop your business's overall marketing. There is always a special relationship between Social Media Marketing and SEO, and once you understand it, you can easily rank at the top on both search engines and social networks. So what is the relationship between social media planning and SEO?

Social Media Marketing or SEO for Your Business?

Many people weigh Social Media Marketing and SEO against each other to judge which type of marketing is best, but in reality each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Running marketing in parallel on both fronts is essential. Let's walk through the clearest differences between these two marketing methods.

First, the impact each marketing tool has on the overall business is one of the key factors in the choice between Social Media Marketing and website SEO. While you may spend months planning and waiting for visible results from organic SEO, the comparable period for social media planning is much shorter. However, the effort you invest in SEO pays off in the long run — something social media cannot give you. Once you rank at the top for a given keyword, you tend to stay in that position for a relatively long time, unless your competitors are so strong and creative that they produce outstanding content.

In addition, the value that website SEO delivers is easier for businesses to measure. You can count likes, shares, and subscribers on social media marketing, but those numbers won't help you calculate conversion rate, purchase rate, or bounce rate the way website SEO does.

Social Media Marketing's Audience Is More Specific Than SEO's

Every advertising campaign only works at full effect when you target the most promising potential customers — that's when everything you prepared during social media planning comes into play. Compared with Social Media Marketing and traditional SEO, marketing on social channels makes it easier to aim precisely at the audience you want. This superiority comes from the filters and smart algorithms that the social networks themselves develop.

That said, being able to segment customer groups is not the only factor to weigh when deciding whether Social Media Marketing or website SEO is the better way to market. Your advertising strategy should be planned around customer psychology and habits. Customers' buying decisions depend on their age, gender, education, and where they live. In general, surveys show that 61% of consumers asked said they use search engines to research a product before deciding to buy it. Meanwhile, 75% of young people aged 18–26 agreed that suggestions from people connected to them on social media influence their decisions. Broadly, target customer identification for Social Media Marketing is based on personality, whereas with SEO, customer behavior drives more accurate decisions.

Social Media Marketing Makes Marketing Content Spread Further

As mentioned above, a product used and recommended by friends on Facebook earns more trust than one advertised on a website. The engagement that Social Media Marketing provides not only improves the business's reputation but also helps you build connections with potential customers. What's more, thanks to the wide connectivity of social media, a piece of content noticed by a few people will, once it receives a steady stream of shares and interactions, see its reach grow exponentially. Meanwhile, waiting for an SEO article to attract lots of attention takes a great deal of effort.

Content Tailored to Social Media Marketing and SEO

Content always plays an important role in both social media planning and Google SEO. However, the content optimized for each branch of marketing is different. The first difference worth noting is article length: social media posts are considerably shorter (< 1000 words) than articles that qualify for SEO. But keep in mind that longer content comes with more shares, likes, and engagement — users only share posts that contain plenty of helpful information to their personal pages. Marketers can optimize Social Media Marketing and SEO at the same time by publishing the detailed article on the website, then sharing the link with a few of the most compelling lines on their fanpage across social networks.

The second factor is that content for social media is also less academic and technical. Conversely, visual elements — eye-catching images, lively, creative videos — are favored over text content in Social Media Marketing. Even so, images and video are increasingly proving essential for website SEO, especially for e-commerce sites. When creating content for the website, beyond optimizing the SEO content, don't forget to optimize image quality, description tags, and meta tags.

Does Social Media Marketing Affect SEO Ranking?

Social Media Marketing is not one of the criteria Google uses to evaluate a web page's ranking in the SERPs. However, marketing well on social channels means you appear before more audiences, and with that, your chances of being shared and linked to increase. And of course, everyone knows links and shares are factors that DO strongly influence SEO ranking.

Years ago, Google counted the number of backlinks a website received to rank it. Clearly, this approach had many flaws — above all, these backlinks were easily manipulated and faked with black-hat SEO techniques such as keyword stuffing and building fake websites and ghost sites to link back to the main site. That's why Google increasingly values shares on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, where users and followers exert strong influence on Social Media Marketing, play a more important role, and above all are harder to fake. The more followers you have, the more opportunities there are for the content you publish to be seen and shared.

Nowadays, your blog posts and website will rank higher if Google sees you as a trustworthy source. Social media influence also comes from external factors such as views, likes, and the relevance and engagement of your posts and fanpage with users. Simply put, the more likes, comments, and shares you receive on social media, the higher you'll rank in the SERPs. So investing in Social Media Marketing not only helps the business reach specific audiences on social networks, but the main website also receives more views, sales, and brand recognition in turn.

Doing Social Media Marketing Right to Improve SEO

Besides doing Social Media Marketing on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, Google+ is also one of the promising social networks. Having a presence on Google+ is one of the factors Google uses to evaluate your website. Updating your profile and regularly posting content to the Google+ community will significantly boost website ranking. Make sure you post content related to your chosen core keywords. This proves to Google that you deserve a high ranking on their search engine.

On any social network, posting frequency is something you and your marketing team should plan carefully. Unlike website SEO, updating your fanpage regularly is essential to increasing your organic appearances and reach with followers. In addition, hashtags are one of the most effective strategies in Social Media Marketing for spreading content widely and making sure it reaches the right audience.

Upgrading SEO Quality to Support Social Media Marketing

Nowadays, articles focused solely on cramming in as many trending keywords as possible are no longer rated as highly by Google as they once were. The world's largest search engine wants to build ever more user-friendly filters, which is why ranking websites now demands more quality, useful, relevant SEO articles. Whereas SEO-ers used to focus on individual keywords, the direction many are now taking is high-quality keywords with reasonable length and detail that meet user needs. Ranking at the top of search engines not only gets you in front of more searchers, but also builds trust and makes it easier to promote your brand widely with Social Media Marketing.

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