Social Media Marketing versus Search Engine Marketing
We recently had a client ask us if the CEO of the company should simply use Twitter instead of the news feed on their website as in his opinion it was much easier for the boss to post news in this format. We were surprised.
Why? Because they thought all you need to do is Tweet as its easy, no formatting etc. This is how we responded:
First, although Twitter is easier to use on the surface, it’s much more than a place to simply post a bit of news. What I mean is you need to understand what kind of tweets are correct for business, re tweeting, setting up hyper links to read and track the rest of the story etc. As you can appreciate a 140 character sentence isn’t enough to share much and this is why most people that tweet regularly hyper link and much more.
If you look at the Webacom Twitter you will see all the links that go to our website. http://twitter.com/webacom. I have only scratched the surface as to how to use Twitter and the primary intent is to gain dedicated followers and engage in discussions etc. In the end this is not going to be easier for your CEO and although Google does crawl Twitter you’re always best to start with getting search traffic to your website first as that’s far more important initially.
The point I’m getting at is people are so concerned with SM that they forget the most important fundamental for websites and that’s BEING FOUND IN SEARCH ENGINES.
Consider these facts from Google Canada 101:
Canadian data only
- 24.5 million Canadian users are online• Average user spends 44 hours each month
- Average usage days per month, 25.4 days
- Search popularity in Canada, 3.5 Billion, yes let’s stop and rethink that number!!! Get this, that’s Canada only, one month only, July 2009. That’s 143 searches per person in Canada in one month. Search is the #2 most popular activity on the web, second only to email.
Where does your website rank in Search? Are you in the top ten, twenty?
Most of the action if you will is in the top ten search results, yet over 80% of websites are not optimized correctly. So here we are all excited about engaging in SM, yet the most important aspect of the internet SEARCH, is not being used.
In conclusion I really can’t imagine how many billions of dollars in lost opportunities are happening on a daily basis just in Canada. Yet, these so called social networking gurus all claim you must spend money left, right and centre on SM, yet they don’t even understand the basics of SEARCH, what a shame.
Check this out yourself, take a keyword, not your business name as that’s easy to find, a keyword that someone may type relevant to your service or product and see how your site ranks.
Would you like a free search evaluation? Email Jay at jay@webacom.com.
