Although search engine optimisation is a new industry when compared to, IT, it’s been around long enough to have developed a bit of history. That history can help your search engine optimisation campaign, or it can hinder it. When it comes to adding social media to your SEO plan, it’s important to know which areas of old SEO are likely to hold you back.
The huge difference in communication styles between social media networks and other areas of the net has come as a nasty shock to many businesses. Just as they’ve managed to conquer the net, a whole new kind of interaction comes along. It’s hard, and it takes a lot of work.
Here are three of the ways in which a traditional approach to social media is going to let you down:
1. Social media isn’t technical. Search engine optimisation grew up around the technical requirements of the search engines. Although both search engines and SEO have grown beyond this these days, there is still a technical core to everything that a search engine optimisation company does. This has to be let go of for social media.
The social media networks are built on human interaction. Human interaction can’t be faked, although many businesses have tried. This means that if you want to succeed on a social media site, you need to devote genuine attention to it. Talk to our team at SEO Consult Australia about social strategies.
2. Social influence is complicated. Dealing with the search engines gets site owners into an unfortunate algorithmic mode of thinking. Although the search engines’ algorithms are highly complex, they are still mathematical equations. Social media sites don’t work like that because people don’t work like that.
Many site owners have run into this problem when trying to get articles ranked in social bookmarking sites. These sites are all about human appeal.
3. There is no ‘me’ in social media. Okay, there is, but there shouldn’t be. One thing you’ll notice about social media sites is that everything is free. It’s all about sharing. Social media does concentrate on egos, but it is more concerned about how to share ideas than how to sell them.
If this is true, it’s a fair question to ask why businesses would want to participate on social media. The reason is that all that sharing eventually pays dividends. Just as sharing your cake at a picnic generally means you get to have some of someone else’s wine, sharing attention on social media sites eventually draws attention to you. This is a slightly different concept from SEO, which generally concentrates on drawing attention directly, if possible.
The good news is, all of the above ideas are going to help your search engine optimisation campaign generally. Modern SEO needs a more human approach to succeed, as the search engines are finding ways to act more like human searchers. To succeed with social media and with SEO generally, start leaning away from the technical and toward the human.
