Shrill – Social Media Marketing for the Rest of Us

Let me say this once and for all:  Social Media Marketing is not Search Engine Optimization, period.

No, SMM is not a part of  SEO either, and calling it SMO (Social Media Optimization) doesn’t make it any different. A top-notch SEO expert is not necessarily a Social Media Wiz, and vice-versa. They are different specialties with a different focus.

Allow me a “girlie ” analogy to better illustrate my point:

A hair dresser and a pedicure specialist work in the same field, yet we would be better off not trusting the first with our toes and the second with our “dos” just because they work in the same salon.

What happens in Internet Marketing is about the same that happens in the beauty parlor: different professionals with different skills collaborate towards a great result.

Social Media can eventually, and often does, contribute to better search engine rankings. You are building links, you are spreading the word, you are generating buzz and eventually people will respond giving you more links, more buzz and more attention. You are using keywords quite often; you are publishing company related content in relevant places. Combine all that off-site work with excellent SEO and your rankings will most likely improve.

Sometimes, so much, people tend to call Social Media Marketing “off-site SEO”. Another HUGE mistake, if you ask me. The focus of a good Social Media professional is totally different of that of a SEO professional.

Let me point just a few of the differences:

• A SEO professional thinks “rankings”, that is their focus. Their job is to come up with ways that will make your website appear in a good position in search engine results, every time someone punches in a query related to the website he is working on. A SEO professional is a person that has unparalleled knowledge about search engine algorithms, as well as website coding and organization, able to make the crawlers read, understand and index the site.
• A Social Media Marketer, although mindful of SEO concepts, has a different focus: people. Not bots, not crawlers, not algorithms. A Social Media Marketer’s job is to get people to find your site, love, visit, mention and link to it. We are evangelists for the companies we represent and our mission is to make people happy about these companies.
  Our goal is not better rankings or even better traffic, although, as I said earlier, that is often a result of well applied social media efforts. Our goal is to spread the word,  improve a company’s reach, reputation and conversion rates through online branding and reputation management strategies.

Good SEO and SMM professionals can clearly see and respect these differences and the boundaries, and will often collaborate. Sadly that is hardly the norm, and because the people who buys these services doesn’t usually have a good grasp on this matter either, we often have one type of professional trying to sell both services or, while being very good at one specialty, passing and selling him/herself as the other.

The result is disastrous: SMM consultants that can’t get the site to rank and SEO specialists spamming the web with keyword stuffed (and usually quite poor) content and using popular SM platforms to publish an obnoxious amount of promotional links and sales pitches, to artificially inflate  inbound link count, but adding no relevancy whatsoever.

And I am not even touching the spam bots in this post because it would be like kicking a dead dog.

I am fortunate enough to work in a place that has very good SEO pros and I learned a lot with them. They never cease to amaze me. We often exchange ideas and collaborate and so far we’ve been getting great results for the clients. (Well, we get paid for performance, so we better know what we are doing… *laughs*)

I had to write this post as I know many small businesses are in the process of buying such services, and it is a good idea to verify exactly what kind of specialty is being offered, which services and how much your provider really knows about it. But I can tell you this, concerning Social Media: be very suspicious of any provider who promises huge numbers, and fast results. You know the drill, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.