Social Media or SEO?
What am I noticing, what am I noticing? It’s a tussle, I’ve been recommending being super active on Social media now for a while. Instagram has been the fashion for digital promotion for a year at least. Facebook might be dying a slow death as the younger fail to engage, but Social Media is still a hugely active way to push a brand or website.
However, if ever we had a blur of content overkill, it has to be on Instagram. It seems every 2nd or 3rd post is now an advert and because I follow so many people, it never stays still. For me to properly catch up with friends and family on Social Media I would need at least an hour a day. I don’t have that sort of time.
Elon Mush is doing his best to destroy Twitter, it’s a journalist’s haven these days, and the number of fake accounts has to be high… certain of the few thousands of followers we have at NCompass only a small fraction of them partake in any sort of activity at all. Social Media has this real issue of what to do with the infrequent user. Delete them after 2 years of inactivity? or just leave them there forever.
Tracking Social
SEO – kicks in again at this point because, we at any rate, have noticed a big drop in the effectiveness of Social Media. But also in the ability for reliable tracking – this has been an ongoing issue for years now. All those clicks on Social Media accounts – where are they all going to? Instagram as a general rule doesn’t even have links in its posts. So what are we doing putting so much effort into a marketing platform that cannot actually link us to our website and get people shopping?
Instead, we think that people see our lovely posts, and then later at some other point in the future, they think of the ‘brand’ and then Google it. So straight back to being an SEO or Organic source.
This is backed up partly because we can see that if a client is active on Social Media their ‘Direct Traffic’ goes up significantly and their Organic Traffic also received a big boost. In short, Google Analytics cannot actually track all this Social Media traffic very effectively.
SEO
And this starts to bring us full circle, if the SEO is weak, then we’re wasting even more time promoting brands on Social Media.
Obviously, the website needs to be up to date, in terms of products, stock, pricing, delivery and so on. but when was the last time it was checked for broken links. missing images, old blog posts etc. There is a technical side of SEO that is often overlooked and there is where we can step in and take a look.
What we have started to notice is that working on the website actually produces some tangible results. As more and more advertisers move more and more to Social Media, if we start tweaking the website Google is listening and because Google is wanting to claw back some of the lost attention from marketeers, these tweaks on the website are starting to be noticed.
In the olden days, only a few years ago, we used to say SEO results will start to show in 3-6 months, then it became 6-8 weeks, but realistically these days we can see an improvement in SEO Traffic within days, a week and things really start showing up. Google is fast these days.
So which – Social Media or SEO?
As usual, both.
I cannot advocate any slow down on Social media at all, it’s a cutthroat world and you have to go to where your customers are. However, SEO cannot be related to 2nd place, and indeed a few tweaks and the benefits will quickly appear. So the real answer is, of course, more. Keep going with the Social Media effort, but do more SEO as well.
Now apply, SEO technical to Social Media. I have two main recommendations at this point:
- Technical – apply UTM links to every link you ever use on Social Media – if you give others links to us, give them a link that contains the information you need.
www.gaconfig.com – will allow you to build super friendly and easy URLs. - Blog – use the website as the dumping ground for your Social Media marketing. It’s so super simple it just worries me that more clients do not do it. If you think about a great campaign for Social Media – write about it first on your Blog. Then you have an extra layer of something to talk about on Social Media.
Killing two birds with one stone seems to be a straightforward and sensible way to get marketing done. What is often frustrating is the disparity of different groups within the organisation, one person does the website and another the Social Media – they need to talk and share their ideas.
We have template marketing spreadsheets just for this purpose, but they are not designed for being complicated or intricate, they are seriously basic, but give everyone in the team the ability to do their part without constantly referring to each other. Simple, nice and effective.
And finally, NCompass has been selected among the Top SEO Agencies in UK by Designrush