Will Social Media Marketing Replace Traditional SEO As The Best Way To Get Specific Traffic?

Thanks to @HappyHourBoston on Twitter for this excellent question.

This is a question I get asked a lot and people are often surprised by my answer.

Yes I am a geek and I love and embrace Social Media and Social Media Marketing, and use as many of these resources as I can to drive traffic to my niche websites, and of course I recommend other do the same.

For me, one of the main strengths of social media, is the almost instant results you can achieve using it, propelling your rankings dramatically to page one quickly in many cases.

It’s not unusual to have a page one entry in hours (not days) with social media, but what happens after the buzz dies down?

Well if you’ve used a few social media sites like (say) WordPress.com, Squidoo.com, and Hubpages.com, making intelligent use of tags and perhaps followed it up with a bit of bookmarking and promotion with websites like Digg.com, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon.com, etc, and maybe even tried a little fancy rss then chances are unless your targeting a super competitive keyword, that you’ll be well on your way towards page one (if not there already).

Now it’s not quite that easy, and Google is getting smarting at working out people “gaming” the search engines like this, and are not ranking sites quite as quickly using this approach as they used to or taking back the positions they give you quickly in the past (meaning you might last a day or so on page one before dropping back).

To get around this, you need to start looking into going a little wider, and incorporating multiple levels of link networks, and using a wider range of social media sites, and then keep promoting.  e.g. Update your content, add more content, etc.

With an appropriate plan, and some determination, you’ll make some great grounds towards that page one ranking, and if your really lucky getting some terrific page rank along the way.

Now you have probably figured out that I am a geek, and that I widely promote people to use social media sites (web 2.0) as much as possible.
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But did you know that I’m also an SEO guy?  I’ve consulted extensively in the past for various SEO projects, and am to this day heavily involved with SEO and push this as part of  our strategies for web domination (stay tuned for our world domination plans). 

This is where my strategy differs from many others.  I don’t pick one side, I use both.  In my experience, you usually find there are two schools of thought.

On the one side, is the seasoned SEO veteran, who believes no other technology should be used.  SEO is the path to follow and perhaps when pushed voice the opinion that social media is just a fad.

By and large these people have pushed the same opinion for many years.  Give me a few months, a heap of backlinks, and some on page optimization, and you’ll have your page one ranking.  Come back and see me in three months and we will celebrate our page one ranking then.

Then there is the other school of thought, the social media supporters, some who don’t believe you even need to buy a domain name (just put your money pages on a free web 2.0 site somewhere).  These people are facebook/myspace/twitter/insert catchy web 2.0 site here junkies, and always seem to be recommending a new little web 2.0 startup that will give you incredible rankings (and yes they can be right sometimes).

Often these people are affiliate promoters who use social media sites to get dramatically quick rankings for a specific period of time, make the profit, and leave (no that there is anything wrong with that).

Invariably these type of promotions work well for social media, but then the rankings achieved during the campaign slip over time because they had no real long term stickiness e.g. a lack of backlinks, etc.

It’s fairly rare to find someone promoting and using both technologies.

I’m one of those people     And I think you should join me, the view from here is incredible! 

Yes, why not use both SEO and Social media?  Why do one and not the other?

Have the cake and eat it too?  Yes, I want both.

This is what I use and what I recommend.  Use SEO and Social media sites to blow away your competition.

As far as I am concerned, both are just tools to help me achieve a goal.  And the goal of course is beating the opposition with a big stick and taking over page one and then staying there.

And why wouldn’t you use both?  Why not use the power of social media sites to get super fast rankings, and great traffic literally in hours if not days, and then once you have the rankings keep them there with a combination of both?

This has proven to be enormously successful for us over the past year or so, and depending on the type of promotion I’ll use either or both  to achieve my goals.

For example with the recent mind movies campaign, this was a promotion that was only going to last a week or so, so we made the decision to get involved using primarily web 2.0 (social media).

This was especially important given the time frame we had, and the time (or lack of) we had to promote it.  We wanted to do an initial bit of promotion, and then leave it to “self-promote”.

What happened during the promotion?  Well I did numerous video’s in glorious high definition (nearly used up 200GB of hard drive space!).   Everything from the first time I look at the competition, through deciding on keywords, getting initial rankings, then moving to page one, and then looked at the money we made, as well as competitors, and various other techniques.

This was really just a social media promotion (If your interested in seeing all the video I did, click the link in the top left hand corner).  We did have a domain we purchased, and we drove all traffic to that, but we used many social media sites to get traffic and quick rankings.

We got involved, got our page one rankings for most of the keywords we targeted (and a large number of keywords we DIDN’T target at all), and made a nice return on investment of the initial time we put into the promotion.

What we didn’t do was do any “ranking stickiness”.  In other words, we didn’t do anything to keep our rankings for the longer term, since this was a 10 day promotion only.

So this is a very important question to ask yourself, when looking at your market.

Are you in this market for the long run, or just to make a quick buck and move onto the next one?

If you looking to get involved in a niche for the long term, then definitely SEO should be part of your plan from day one.  But you should also use the power of social media at the same time to boost your initial results, and to drive some early traffic.

If you’re going down the SEO road, it can be a lonely one, if your spending weeks slowly building up rankings, and backlinks.  How many days are you waiting to receive your first visitor?  Your first 10?  Your first 100?

It takes a strong mind to keep on pushing when you don’t see any immediate results.  Frankly, many people give up during this period and never get to page one, or see their first sale, etc.  It can get quite discouraging.

Of course the results can be mind blowing when the SEO results come in.  But waiting is the hard thing.

Contrast this with social media sites.  I’ve done simple promotions using a number of social media sites, where I’ve received traffic within an hour or putting a website up, and a sale within 3 hours!  How different would that make you feel?

I still to this day, never tire of getting the “You made a commission” email’s.

This is another reason I do both (SEO and Social media promotion).  See short term results, which can help build the confidence for the long journey.

Ok, got a bit sidetracked there didn’t I.  What was I meant to be doing?

Oh yes I was meant to be answering the question @HappyHourBoston on twitter asked.

Long story short?  No, I do not believe social media will replace traditional SEO as the best way to get traffic.  However it’s going to play an increasingly bigger part of the strategy.

If you’re still not convinced, look at the Alexa top 20 ranking of sites.  These are the sites that are getting the most traffic for any single website on the Internet (Not that it’s particularly accurate, because Alexa relies on you have their toolbar installed, or some other way to track you visiting the website, but I digress and it’s useful enough as a guide).

It’s Google and Yahoo fighting it out for position #1 and #2, then it’s MySpace, Youtube, and Facebook in positions 3 through 5, and I count at least 4 more social media sites in the top twenty including two photo sharing sites (flickr and photobucket) as well as free blogging sites like blogger.com and wordpress.com.

Twitter is ranked position 937!  Amazing when you consider what twitter is.

What does that tell you?  People are using social media sites, so you should be using them too.  Go where your potential visitors are, use content sources that your visitors will want (audio, video, images) learn how to use twitter, find out about facebook and start interacting today.

The fact is, people are embracing social media technology, and people actively using these websites are probably never going to be happy going back to a pre-web 2.0 existence using just email to communicate are they?  So Social media is not going away any day soon, it’s getting more integrated in society.

Use both as part of your promotion strategies and know your doing something the majority of your competitors are not (and usually this is a good thing),

I’ll leave it there for now.  Going to go back to my Yahoo Pipes video which I will be posting soon.  This will rock your world, trust me.
Cheers

Tim

P.S.
Have you had a read of our Link Building Service article yet?