Unleashing the Power of SEO and Social Media Marketing

If you are getting started with digital marketing and wondering if Search Engine Optimization works better or if it is SMM, tons of articles, videos, and other forms of content on the internet claim one to be better than the other. However, your business objective should decide if SEO or SMM will work better for you or whether a strategy involving SEO and Social Media Marketing will be better suited for you. In this article, we will be explaining the differences between SEO and Social Media Marketing so that you can curate your strategy and see for yourself what will be most suitable for the growth of your business. 

Search Engine Optimization  

SEO involves optimizing webpages so that they rank higher on search engine result pages when specific queries related to your content are made. The ranking of individual web pages contributes to the ranking of the entire website and builds domain authority. The ranking also affects the traffic that your website will receive.  

Social Media Marketing  

SMM is publishing various forms of content, including static creatives, and long and short-form videos on various social media platforms to build relations with the audience, aka a community, and spread awareness about the brand.   

Now that you know what SEO and Social Media Marketing signify, let’s dive right into what differential factors come into play.  

The Intent of the Content  

When creating content, keeping Search engine optimization in mind, the main agenda is to formulate informative pieces so that your audience gets all the information in one place, and they don’t need to hop on to 10 pages. Your articles should be relevant to your heading and cover the different aspects of it. For example, the how-to articles, explaining differences like the one you are reading right now or educational/informative ones.  

In social media marketing, the main objective is to engage with the audience and produce some sort of action, which may be in the form of emotional reactions or, your audience producing content on your prompt or even making a purchase or getting redirected towards some other platform. The content tailored for social media can be entertaining, informative or a blend of both. However, the content is meant for instant consumption, so following the current consumption patterns, it must be short and snacky.    

Audience  

Analyzing the audience is a prerequisite in developing any marketing strategy. Similarly, you need to build an audience persona before you start working on either. When SEO is done, the intended audience is more targeted and niche. At the same time, social media covers a broader range of audiences with different demographics in the scope of the organic mechanism. If you are utilizing the tools and targeting a specific set of people via ads, you can also follow through a niche. 

Results and Analysis  

The metrics that will determine success in SEO and SMM are different. Social Media pertains to the number of followers gained and the kind of engagement received. It is also a possibility that one piece of your content may perform exceptionally well, and you may go viral and receive a very high engagement. However, the concept of virality does not seep through in SEO as SEO is a long-term effort and reaps benefits for a long time. In the case of SEO, it may take months or even years to reach where you have sight.  

In social media, the shelf life of content is very short; even if one of your pieces goes viral, it will lose its charm quickly. On the other hand, this is not the case in SEO.   

Conclusion   

In conclusion, SEO and SMM require particular efforts. Both have their own set of intricacies in terms of production and distribution of content. Also, the allied benefits and metrics defining success points vary.