As social media increasingly is becoming an important aspect of digital marketing, many
businesses are unsure whether to focus their efforts on effective social media strategies
or SEO strategies. Is one really better than the other? SEO helps businesses and
brands to rank higher in search engines, but social media can help increase a brand’s
exposure and presence online as well.

Here’s a look at SEO and Social Media Marketing and what they can offer for your
business and brand.

Finding The Right Audience

When it comes to targeting the customers and users that you want, social media gets
the job done. This is mainly because social media platforms are designed in a way for
your brand to connect with and interact with both new and existing users. Many social
media sites like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook will let you use sponsored ads that
help you to target the users or audience that you’re looking to convert.

On the flip side, SEO is more focused on keywords and search result rankings, rather
than identifying and targeting your key demographics or user groups. While SEO can
help you to narrow in on a target audience, social media platforms are optimized to help
you target users through ads.

Implementing A Strategy

When implementing a strategy, it’s important to have a plan in place for how you’re
going to go about your social media or SEO efforts.

Good brands and businesses thrive when they are active and engaging on social media
platforms. This means that you’ll need to have a plan, such as a content calendar, for
what content you’d like to post regularly on your social media accounts. There are a
variety of online tools available to help schedule social media posts in advance, but it is
important to have a set plan for implementing your social media strategies.

With SEO, there’s usually more work required upfront in the planning of your SEO
strategies. As you begin to properly optimize your website, webpages, and content for
search engine results, you’ll begin to see how your efforts pay off in search engine
rankings.

Developing Content

Content is key in the digital marketing world. What kind of content you create can help
to keep users engaged on your website and social media pages, which can greatly help
you to attract more traffic to your site.

SEO strategies will be most successful when using long form content such as articles.
Short blog posts with a limited amount of keyword usage may not be able to cut it for a
solid SEO strategy. With long form content you can provide an optimal amount of
information on a given subject to your users, while implementing the keyword(s) that
you want to rank for.

Social media on the other hand usually always uses image and video content. As your
social media content is liked and shared by users, the social media platforms will award
you with increased exposure and more user traffic to your social media account.

The Consensus

Developing a SEO and social media strategy that can work in tandem will help you
check off all the boxes that you’re looking for when it comes to marketing your business
online. Whether you’re creating long form content for webpages, planning and
scheduling posts for your social media contents, or including images in your articles and
links to your blogs and articles in your social media, SEO and social media marketing
both can help you to increase user engagement and traffic to your website and social
media accounts.

Many search engines are now using social media as a way to rank websites and
businesses, making it even more important to create SEO and social media campaigns
that will benefit each other. A business or brand that lacks a strong social media
presence will likely be seen as a weak link to search engines.

So which strategy is better when it comes to SEO vs Social Media Marketing? The
answer shouldn’t be all that surprising… using both will provide you with the most
benefits for your brand and business.