Social Media Marketing and SEO for Small Business

The small business marketing press and blogosphere are rich with tales of social media. AS the CEO of a fast growing digital marketing agency, I hear customers asking about social media on a daily basis. Because social media is such a "shiny object", it's often segmented from other online marketing and communication channels such as search engine optimization. The truth is that social media and SEO have a significant impact on each other.

The growth in attention to social media as a marketing, communication and community building opportunity deserves the attention of small business marketing, communications/PR, customer service, product development, human resources and sales functions. The synergies between Social & SEO are particularly important because of the effort-to-outcome ratio. Read the following Q and A to better understand the SEO and Social Media relationship.

Searcher expectations have changed. Customers no longer have the sole expectation of searching to find information for a specific outcome. As small business consumers spend more and more time connecting, sharing and interacting with the social web, they now often expect to interact with what they find in the search results.

Customers have always been able to save the useful things they find in search results by bookmarking or saving to the favorites in the browser. Bookmarks are now social, to be shared and leveraged via the collective wisdom of preferences from other likeminded searchers. The growth and popularity of socially enabling web applications (social bookmarks, news, networking, messaging, publishing & media sharing) drive consumer expectations for social interaction with search even more. For online to offline convergence of small business social networking, look no further than the success of services like Twitter or FourSquare.

Another aspect to searcher expectations is that consumers search social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace) to a small degree, as an alternatives to standard search for information, references and recommendations. In fact, comScore rates YouTube, Facebook and MySpace as two of the top 25 search engines after Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and AOL.

Consumers are not as comfortable with formal marketing messages and there is something inherently more trustworthy about recommendations made by others willing to take the time to review products/services and share their opinions. Marketers realize this of course and as a result, there has been an increase in the number of “fake” reviews on ecommerce sites.

The Difference in Context of Search and Social Media - For small business marketers, it’s important to understand the difference in how/why people spend time searching compared to time spent with social media. Fundamentally, a searcher has a question, unmet need or pain point to be solved and initiates action through a query on a search engine. The result is being presented with matching search results & ads. Depending on the searcher’s stage in the research process or buying cycle, they’ll drill down to a solution or refine their query and continue searching.

Time spent with the social web involves many types of interactions with like-minded individuals in a community or network, one of which is looking for and sharing recommendations. As I mentioned earlier, customers are not as responsive to formal marketing messages. While it’s the goal for search engines and search advertisers to make their ads more useful and relevant to searchers, that is not always the case. The investment in time with a social community, whether it’s Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, along with the quality of interactions builds trust that’s difficult to duplicate in online advertising as we know it.

In a recent conversation with an online retailer about the merits of investing in SEO versus Social Networking, she stated, "SEO will increase traffic to my web site from Google but building out my social network on Facebook will build better relationships. I value relationships much more than web site clicks".  This is an important distinction for online marketers to consider. The good news is, with the right planning and insight, you can have the best of both worlds.

How can marketers’ efforts in social media channels do a better job of going beyond applying the same old rules and take on more of a "give to get" strategy?

This is where the notion of investing in optimized conversations and connections comes in to play. Effective social advertising is less about attaching marketing messages to content and more about being the content. This isn’t new in advertising or direct marketing when you think about it. TV commercials and direct mail as entertainment and art have been popular for years. The difference is that marketing online is so ingrained with advertisers and marketers as a direct marketing channel, they don’t yet understand the opportunities from building community, creating something of value that persists and not just as a campaign, as a way to communicate their message.

Rather than looking at social media sharing sites as just another place to dump their existing content, small business marketers should consider understanding what is important to social communities through content, link and tag analysis (a keyword based listening exercise) and create content that meets those needs. The content created can add to the SEO efforts for search based discovery as well as through the social web.

Push and Pull SEO Effect of Social Media Marketing. Social media marketing efforts that create conversations and buzz can influence queries on keywords used in search the same way advertising and the result of public relations through media coverage can drive search traffic.

In social web situations, a great idea can spread quickly, driving people to search for more formal information. The push is the instigation of a new concept in social media situations, providing useful information and provoking discussions about it. The pull (searching for) comes from the idea catching fire and people searching for more information on it.

Another aspect to the push and pull effect involves content that is created by marketers and/or discussions that come out of a social media marketing effort that can also rank in the search results. Creating socially enabled content that is optimized for keywords phrases with established demand allows a brand, product or company to occupy multiple positions on the same search query. By socially enabling that content with save/share/comment features, marketers facilitate distribution within social communities.

Here, the push is the creation of optimized content that includes features to make it easier to travel within social communities. So many people are empowered to link to content on the web through blogging, commenting on blogs, user generated content and reviews that the optimized content can achieve desired visibility within standard search engines.  The pull comes from people searching standard search engines for things they need and finding the optimized content.

Social media, networks and the content that's produced as an outcome affects search in many ways. What's important for small business marketers and the Social SEO agencies that serve them is to understand how and plan campaigns to take advantage of both for compounded results.