Can Social Media Kill the SEO Star? Our Take on the SEO vs. Social Media Showdown

Indeed, the popularity of social media has spread like wildfire over the past three years, and even when search engine optimization (SEO) remains to be the primary instrument for websites to gain incoming traffic, a lot of enterprises are now looking towards the benefits of social media to their own ventures. These days we see brands in social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, even if they don’t have their own websites set up yet. But it’s now time for us to face this question:

Can Social Media finally beat SEO?

There are actually different factors to consider when choosing between SEO and social media, depending on your business goals. Below are some of the major tenets in which you can gauge which is the better platform to use.

Where SEO beats Social Media

Yes, there are areas in which SEO remains to be king, despite the increasing mass appeal of social media, and these include lead generation, finding businesses and visibility of local businesses.

Lead generation objectives are still best achieved through SEO practically because it’s the people who seek for particular business-and when they like this brand that sells the business they’ve been looking for, they will proactively sign-up, and not the other way around. In social media, lead generation takes a few steps in order to materialize, making your reach to your target audience (for the purposes of conversion) quite slow.

As for finding businesses and the visibility of local businesses, SEO still gets to beat social media. It’s the same rationale as that of lead generation; people look for businesses on search engines. In social media, they usually look for the people they know, such as long-lost friends, relatives, family members, acquaintances and popular public figures-not businesses or companies. When looking for businesses, they rely more on search engines because they are taken directly to the sites that they want to check out, and in turn they are able to gather the information they need to use.

Where Social Media beats SEO

There are also areas in which social media proves to be more effective than SEO, and when used appropriately, social media can be the key instrument in making a particular brand truly successful. In this regard, businesses can profit best from social media when their goals include brand awareness and audience engagement.

For one, social media is a platform for building communities of shared interests, likes and dislikes, sentiments and advocacies. This is also where they follow popular names such as celebrities, product brands, movies, artists, etc. Hence, businesses that want their brands to be felt by their target customers should definitely make use of social media so that they can be exposed to the right audiences and be explored by users who happen to be interested in what they offer.

At the same time, businesses who wish to reach out better to the members of the community they have formed, such as introducing new products or providing promos and contests, will also benefit from social media. This is because their pages serve as the common ground for fans from all walks of life to visit without actually exerting extra effort to do so. You don’t have to enter the brand’s address or search for it on Google just to join their contests and promos-you can just click their Facebook page and there you can instantly join their contests or avail of their coupons, discounts and other giveaways.

Enjoying the Best of Both Worlds

There are ways however, in which you can get the best of both SEO and social media. How? It’s by fusing their elements together, i.e. making your brand’s Facebook page SEO-friendly. Surprisingly, this task doesn’t have to be gruesome, as long as you know what you’re doing.

For one, when setting up your brand’s Facebook page, make sure that you are using the appropriate keywords that describe your business. This way, your Facebook page will be recognized by Google algorithms when a user makes a search using the keywords you’ve inserted.

Another way to pimp up your social media pages is by inserting a meta-description. You can do this by filling up the “About” section with the appropriate info about your brand as this also checked by search engines. As much as possible, include the tags that describe your business so your page will be in a way, optimized.

Lastly, make sure that you post content that allows viewers to check out your home page, and this is by including a link that redirects them to your website. For example, you post a picture on your brand’s Facebook Timeline, and in the caption you include a link to your website. Through this simple trick you give your fans the eye candy, feed them with the right info, and make them yearn for something more-hence they have nowhere else to go but click on your link.