Social Media, Web 2.0, and Search Engine Optimisation

We are getting more and more enquiries and questions surrounding social media, but what is more interesting is the way they are asked e.g. “I want more social media activity, how can you do that for us?”. The assumption is that it is worth doing.

It is clear that social media is important, but what isn’t so clear is why it is important to commercial sites and outfits. My point here is that Twitter, Facebook et al are ubiquitous- company pages and accounts are growing like weeds, but to what end?

If it is to promote brand and product then is this a useful vehicle?- are people looking for interactions and some level of personal involvement with a “thing”, or as the name itself suggests are they looking for that connection with people. My simpleton approach is very black-and-white, people use social media to connnect and interact with people, companies use it in an attempt to get people to connect and interact with a “thing”, a commercial proposition.

We are happy to advise on how to build a social media presence, but it gets a little messy when you try to correlate that activity with a strict ROI. In SEO. results are clear, e.g. increased rankings, more traffic, more conversions. With social media though there is a disconnect- the technology itself contains no direct links between the social media vehicle and a commercial interaction- social media isn’t built for this, its built for people to interact with, to share (for good or bad) what’s on their mind, what they like, where they’re going etc. etc.

Kerry came up with a possible SEO definition  for social media:
“it is [any web application] that you interact with that has nothing to do with SEO”.

At first glance this seems pretty harsh, but lets look deeper…
With SEO we have the power to influence some key factors and make a site really attractive to search engines.

Related Posts

1. Social Media is no vehicle for Search Engine Optimisation
2. Is social media getting more mainstream?
3. $65 Billion not being spent on advertising, Search Engine Optimisation becoming the marketers best mate
4. Social Media Goes Mobile
5. Social Media – The Stats Are In!
6. The Never Ending Frieding Project-Social Media Marketing Study
7. Tips for Social Media Marketing for 2008
8. The FaceBook Phenomena and Social Media

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 11:28 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.