In today’s online world, SEO and social media are inextricably linked. If you plan to have a successful SEO campaign for your online business, you need to fully utilize social media for the following reasons. Failure to do so may doom your marketing strategy to failure before it even gets started.

An Active Way to Target an Audience

Traditional SEO is a passive form of marketing where customers search for terms and then come to you for a product or service. Using social media SEO, you can take a more active role in pursuing customers. Your social media account forms a connection with customers that allows you to tell them what new items you have to offer that they will be interested in. Rather than relying on somebody checking back to your website or finding your search engine entry, you can create an active interest in your brand and have people looking at what you have to offer whenever they check their social media feed.

Form a Personal Relationship with your Customers

SEO and social media marketing both work well to get the word out about your products and services, but only social media gives you the chance to form a deeper personal connection with your customers. People see their social media feeds as a way of having conversations with people, be they individuals they know or companies they are interested in. By utilizing social media in your marketing campaign, you can make your products more than just another search result. You can interact with customers, show a human side to your company, and develop a very loyal following that you normally would not be able to get through any other means.

Get Valuable Feedback

Social media is also an excellent way to measure the effectiveness of your SEO campaign. While traditional SEO requires you to analyze charts, tables, and other data points that may be obscure or without context, social media provides you with real-time results and personalized feedback that can tell you immediately how you can strengthen your marketing campaign. Measuring tools are more granular, allowing you to determine not only the number of people who see your ads and status updates but also the number of people who took action on them, such as liking or retweeting a specific update.

Social Media is Also SEO

A common myth about social media compared to traditional SEO is that search engines won’t pick up ads and status updates on a social media network. That is true only in a technical sense. Thanks to the proliferation of blogs, your social media activity is more likely than ever to wind up reposted on a website that will register in search engines. If you maintain your SEO guidelines while posting and make sure to make your messages interesting and engaging, other people will help spread the word for you.
The bottom line is that SEO and social media work together. The best marketing campaigns make use of both, and nobody who is looking to spread the word about a product or service should ignore the benefits that social media has to offer.