Should Social Media Marketing be Part of Your Internet Marketing Campaign?

One question that I keep hearing from clients as well as SEO companies is whether social media marketing should be an ongoing part of their Internet marketing campaign or whether it is a stand alone service? It seems that many people are confusing social media marketing with linkbaiting or viral marketing which are “big events” and not ongoing activities.

So lets step back a little and look at what social media optimization (SMO) is all about. At its most fundamental level, SMO is making your content accessible to people online regardless of where they are. This content could be a video on YouTube, a profile on Facebook, or a presence on a niche social site like aSmallWorld.net.

When I explain this to someone, the most common response is that “Why should I focus on social media when all the content I need is on my web site?” That’s a valid question to ask. The mind shift that you have to make with social media, is that your online strategy is not solely focused on your web site! It includes the “neighborhood” around you.

You can have a web site that is solely dependant on generating traffic from one source, search engines. This is the traditional online marketing model. Through PPC and SEO you use the “super highway” of Google, Yahoo and MSN to drive people to your site.

Now using a brick and mortar analogy, consider for the moment that your web site was not in a single location online, but instead had multiple locations. While your store (ie web site) gets a lot of walk-in traffic from one main road (your SEO and PPC strategy) you have noticed some new neighborhoods have began to spring up with a demographic that matches your target audience.

What would you do? You would probably consider expanding your business and building more stores in these new locations and that is where your audience is. The concept of social media optimization is similar. You want your web site and message to appear where your audience is congregating online.

In any city there are good and bad locations for your store. Sometimes it is very obvious from your research whether one neighborhood would be better than another. Same with social media. Not all social media sites are appropriate neighborhoods for all businesses. That is why research is very important, and just like in the brick and mortar world, sometimes a neighborhood doesn’t turn out the way you thought it would.

The best social media site for your company depends on your target audience. For example, if you sell a technology product or service, then Digg might be a perfect site for you to target. If you sell women’s apparel, then sk*rt is a much better neighborhood than Digg.

Keep in mind that different product mixes work in different neighborhoods in the offline world. The social media world is the same. Different communities want information presented to them in different ways. So while your overall marketing message might be the same, how you deliver it could vary from community to community.

Many SEO’s are fixated on Google and ranking highly either organically or through paid. This focus is like a two-legged stool, it can become wobbly at times. By focusing on social media optimization you make yourself less susceptible to any changes in Google’s algorithm. Going back to the brick and mortar example, would you put your business on a road with two barriers across it and let someone else determine whether anyone can drive or walk down the street and pass your store? Of course not. So why would you let Google determine how much traffic that your web site should get?

For the first nine months after launching this blog Google was by far the biggest referrer of traffic to this blog. Since I do not used PPC traffic to drive traffic, my two-legged stool was in fact a one legged stool. Over the last three months I have worked hard to both increase the amount of traffic from social sites as well as increase the number of subscribers. This month traffic from social sites is almost five times as much as that from search engines and the number of subscribers have tripled. As a result my stool now has three solid legs and keeps getting sturdy.

Make social media optimization part of your overall Internet marketing strategy with its own budget and goals. It is not a one-time marketing initiative.

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