The magic term Social Media Marketing (SMM) created a massive hype for last two years on the online world. Everybody is running after social media. We heard a lot of talks about it, thousands of articles were written and more than thousands to come. People started to spend lots of time to market in social media these days.

But, what is the outcome of social media marketing?

There is plenty of evidence that people get immensely benefited by social media marketing, but there are still lots of doubts on it as well.

Is Social Media Marketing Really Effective?

For a few days, this question prompted me to discuss social media marketing on my blog. I thought that it would be interesting if I discuss a topic about
how social media marketing relates to search engine optimization (SEO).

Social Media Marketing Improves Global Link Popularity

The most difficult SEO activity is to ask for back links or recommendations from high-ranking websites. Theoretically it is just an activity of successful SEO process, but in practice it is not at all easy for newly created websites. None is ready to provide back link to a relatively new website.

Here social media marketing plays an important role. Successful social media distribution of high quality contents can easily create important back links to a website. It is not as much complicated as compared to previous one.

Social Media Presence Improves Reputation And Brand Value

It is evident that most of the top-ranking websites always maintain strong online brand recognition in their respective market and that’s why they continuously try to improve their social media presence. It leads to thousands of natural inbound links to them.

If you use this strategy by just registering at as much social networking sites as you can and build your profile to link back to your website, then you must know that it will not work any more.

It is because, major social networking websites implemented a strategy to use nofollow links or truncate out-bound links just to maintain their network as much spam-free as possible.

So, how do you use social media websites to build your brand recognition?

As social media websites will not give you link back to your website any more, you have to use these websites in a completely different way.

Your main target of using these websites is to find or build a community with the people that fit to your target audience and share interesting and quality content with them. If you participate in more than one social media websites, then it is better to cross-reference your presence on different social media websites in order to increase the number of participating people in your community. Try to build your strong presence by providing interesting and quality content for your community and encouraging it’s users’ to actively participate on discussing about your content.

When you are able to do that, then links will automatically come back to your website from bloggers, users, resource websites, forums and your new contacts.

This process will automatically build your brand recognition and increase search engine friendly inbound links to you website.

Don’t Confuse Social Media Marketing As SEO

Don’t confuse social media marketing as search engine optimization. We all know that SEO is mainly technical in nature although relevant fresh quality content is the key to SEO success. Unlike SEO, social media marketing is a marketing process that in turn compliments to
SEO.

Success in social media marketing requires proper planning, interesting and quality content and demands more user interactions. SMM success depends on how do you effectively encourage your community people to speak and share thoughts online about you and your offer.

Though SEO And SMM Are Different – They Can Complement Each Other

If you can effectively use social media marketing then it can bring magic result for you. For your convenience I tried to give an example here. If you are a newcomer and if your website is relatively new with less content, then, if you write an interesting and quality article or a blog post on your website using all perfect SEO techniques, even then you can’t get that much visibility that a pro website normally get.

It is because search engines don’t provide top ranking to those websites, which are relatively new with less content. On the other hand if you submit that article or blog post in a social media website which has high volume of content, you will get better search engine ranking and visibility for the same article or post. And if you have a community with lots of users, then it will bring more success in terms of reference, recommendation, backlinks and traffic compared to your own
website

Conclusion:

From the above discussion, it is clear that social media marketing is becoming more effective in online promotion nowadays. That’s why most of top ranking websites started effective use of social media marketing to improve their brand awareness and recognition.

You also need to put continuous effort in social media marketing effectively parallel to your SEO effort to improve your brand recognition by participating in social media websites and providing fresh new interesting and quality content to your community people to encourage their active interactions.

SMM surely brings more success in terms of reference, recommendation, backlinks and traffic when it is done by the way it should be done.

What is your opinion about it?

If you have any question or thought on it, please feel free to share it.

Debabrata Dhar