Brands need to adopt social media to prosper

Roll back a few years and the main piece of advice for companies seemed to be “get a website”.

We we told that any company that couldn’t be found online would go out of business. That’s not strictly true, of course — it depends a lot on the business — but what is happening is that the stakes are being raised.

Now, it’s not enough to have a website. You need a social media presence and a strategy to drive it.

With Google and Bing incorporating social network data into their search results, there’s an even more compelling argument for brands to capitalise on the power of social, according to Reality Digital.

With the rise in social media comes the need for reputation management — seeing what people are saying about a company or brand and communicating positively with both fans and detractors.

Robert Proctor at Reality Digital said, “Those brands that employ brand focused social networking applications will stand to benefit from these deals hugely, as through this they not only have the benefit of heightened consumer interactivity, but they may also start to see some of the great content from their networks appearing within search engine results.”

Blog marketing: Do social networks outrank search engines?

An interesting article over at Promotion World declares why search engine traffic is not vital to blogs, outlining the strategies bloggers should already be using to drive traffic and, eventually, loyal readers to their blog.

At first I jumped to a conclusion, thinking that the author (TJ Philpott) was saying that search engine ranking and traffic is not important at all.

In fact, that’s not what’s being said — more that SEO (search engine optimisation) and ranking in itself isn’t a necessity for a successful blog.

This should be music to the ears of most bloggers — in fact, any web site publisher — because anyone who has been publishing online for even a modest amount of time knows how fickle search engines can be. One day, you’re riding high on Google, the next you’ve been mysteriously dropped (you probably didn’t do anything wrong, either).

It’s probably fair to say that most passing traffic comes to blogs from search engines — and the majority of that from Google — but the article suggests that spending a bit more time focusing on social networks and social media can pay real dividends.

It does depend to a certain extent on the purpose of your blog, of course.

If you’re merely trying to get footfall in order to increase revenue from advertising, then search engine ranking equals better traffic and more profit.

If, however, you want to build reader loyalty and sense of community (and in turn, perhaps, sell via affiliate marketing, which tends to do better once a level of reader trust has been built up) then SEO may not be enough.

Inbound links from other blogs certainly help, but they can be hard to achieve.

The article suggests that using social media to encourage visitors to your site may not only increase repeat visitors, but can give you a better insight into what readers actually want as you “socialise” on these sites.

It’s interesting food for thought, but the main take-home point for me is that, like income, diversification of visitor sources is vital for the success of most blogs.

I personally don’t think one type of marketing is better than the other, but both should be used in balance to bring visitors to your blog.

What do you think? Are you switching more towards social media marketing, or is SEO still very important?

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