Why has social media marketing suddenly become a buzzword? Is it a new SEO process or does it have capabilities beyond SEO? There are several similar questions that still remain unanswered but first things first, what is social media marketing?

Social Media Marketing = You + Online Communities = High Exposure + Sales

Looks good, doesn’t it? Some of the online communities responsible for bringing social media marketing into the limelight include YouTube, LinkedIn, Technorati, Facebook, and Twitter. Considered as one of the best standalone marketing strategies, social media marketing has now become a recommended process of all SEO experts. There is a direct advantage that websites can derive from social media and this is in the form of better visibility in search engine listings. The most natural question at this point is: how does social media marketing have an impact on search engine listings?

The Social Media Marketing Impact

So here we are, trying to figure out the different ways that social media marketing can improve your websites search engine listing. And the 3 ways of doing it are:

Inbound Links: Yes! You guessed it! Everyone needs inbound links but very few focus on getting relevant and high quality inbound links. Quality inbound links will encourage effective search engine optimization and have a positive influence on the overall ranking of your website. One of the greatest benefits of having inbound links from social media websites is that they are all considered to be natural links and not reciprocal links. Hence, it is important that all website administrators, developers and designers give the necessary importance to inbound links.

Reputation management: Social media marketing can help in building and managing your reputation. Some of the most popular and high ranking social media websites can help in building your online brand value and promote a positive image of your business or company over the Internet. Reputation is a very important aspect that can take a company down or help initiate a tremendous growth process. Hence, if your website is listed in Digg, Technorati, MySpace, Folkd, or others – then in all possibility, it will help to improve your websites Trust, Authority and Page Rank.

Note: Social media marketing has its finer points and if you are not careful about the social media website you want to be associated with then this might even have a disastrous effect on your SEO campaign and create a negative reputation on the Internet.  You want to do everything carefully and make it appear to be natural progression. So don’t obtain 1,000 links on monday and not do another thing for months – the search engines are starting to cater to common sense.

Ranking on Social media websites: Not every website can get a high rank from Day 1 itself. Ranking a website takes time. In order to succeed in most social media websites, you must interact regularly on them to build up your authority with each individual website. The reason social media sites are beneficial is this : if you learn how to you them correctly – their authority can carry over to your website.

Time to rework your social media marketing strategy!!

Joel McLaughlin – Phoenix SEO