There should be no question that social media can be an integral part of search engine marketing. Social media content is content afterall. At sem[c] we have been cross-linking our clients’ social media and websites for years. The prime business goal for a business, that will do the work necessary to best utilize social media (and it’s a lot of work), is to have good, real, frequently updated and optimized content on their website and an active and very interactive social profile. Each will drive traffic to the other. In both cases the strategy is based on the fact that sales are positively influenced by the amount of qualified traffic looking at your content. Each type of content serves a distinct and different purpose. Each type of content has costs and benefits.
You should think of your website as a repository of everything there is to know about your business. You should assume that by the time a prospect interacts with you they will have read everything on your website that is important to them. You really want to be in the short list of possibilities when a prospect is looking for what you sell. To be successful at this you need to develop a contemporary looking website with good, original content. The SEO process as practiced by sem[c] will help you to do this in a way that will get you found AND make it clear to a prospect what’s in it for them. A link to your social media will allow the prospect to see what other people are saying. The costs are monetary: website development, hosting, domain name and time: content generation and organization.
You should think of social media as both part of the validation process when prospects are investigating your business and a potential source of traffic to your website when a prospects finds you via their social network. If someone gets interested in your business because of one your mutual friends they will want to know more and will visit your website. The great thing about social media is that it has little in upfront technical costs. The real cost comes in time. To get the most value out of your social media you will need to create content in an attractive way. The goal is to get people to react to that content which allows you to interact with them. This is the most important task in maintaining social media and it works even in the case of “negative” comments. In fact, like in the old saw that there is no such thing as bad pr, any comment in your social media, no matter how bad it is, can send a powerful message about your business.
Social media can be a great tool in your online marketing toolkit.