Social Marketing v Search Engine Marketing

Writing by Brick Marketing on Thursday, 10 of July , 2008 at 9:30 pm

Which is more important - social marketing or search engine marketing? My first response is why not both! Surely they are not exclusive - and they aren’t.

There are however times when you need to focus more on one area than the other. If you have a website that is competing in an area that has an lot of competition then search engine marketing may be a long term proposal. Social marketing on the other hand can be a short term option that produces better results.

The whole online social environment is booming at present. While there may be arguments about Facebook outdoing Myspace, or vice-versa, it doesn’t matter. They are both performing reasonably well, besides which they are only two players in a large environment. Social marketing has a greater difficulty in deciding where to start - not who is the bigger player.

You can obtain some great results from social marketing if you know the how, when and what aspects. Whilst not considered by many to be social media, forums can provide sites with some of the best targeted traffic available - often better targeted than the search engines.

I have worked with sites that concentrate all their marketing efforts on forums alone. They undertake basic SEO techniques but ignore all the traditional social marketing or social bookmarking sites. Why?

Forums enable them to communicate with others in the their specific field. By offering free items as part of their marketing strategy they receive a lot of traffic - more importantly - they are continually being discussed. They have found that by providing an extremely good service including doing everything possible to ensure customers are happy, along with good products and good prices, they have been able to build a good reputation.

They could probably do a lot better if they wanted to ramp up their marketing to include search engine marketing, social marketing through other avenues and some of the more traditional forms of advertising. Their response - why? They are growing at a steady pace - a pace they can handle. They are receiving a lot of backlinks because others are talking about them and recommending them.

In this instance, social marketing far outweighs search engine marketing. I do note one thing however, their social marketing is, in the long term, doing a lot of the search engine marketing for them!

                      Category: Social Marketing                      

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