Social media marketing is often considered as an addition to an SEO plan. Participating or featuring on social media sites can enhance your site’s reputation across the net, get you some inbound links, help you to develop a community around your site and even boost the rankings of your pages. For this reason, many SEO consultants will consider adding social media marketing to a client’s off-page SEO.

You might feel a little overwhelmed at the thought of having to start out on a completely new campaign. In fact, many businesses are put off by the extra work social media marketing involves. The benefits of participating in social media usually far outweigh the work put in, but it can be hard to see this when you’re first considering the social media.

Social media sites operate quite differently to search engines in many, many ways, and it pays to know the rules before you begin. While there are a lot of differences between optimising for the search engines and optimising for social media sites, but there are a lot of similarities as well.

• Searches will return ranked results. The way users access content on social media sites isn’t that much different from access on search engines. With search engines, results pages are assembled in response to a user query. On social media sites, news feeds are assembled on the presumption that the user query is about recent news, and search results are assembled in the familiar response to the user’s keyword

• Internet users behave in predictable ways. The factors involved in assembling lists of results on social media sites are slightly different, but they are predictable, and things like keywords still play a major part. The results also have a particular audience, who behave in predictable ways. SEO experts take advantage of your existing user knowledge to optimise for your user groups on social media sites

• Content drives rankings. Although many things are taken into consideration in determining where results appear on the various lists on social media sites, content still plays a major part. Your social media content can be treated with optimisation techniques, just as your site’s content will be

• Algorithms are open to reverse engineering. Just as has happened with Google over time, elements of the search algorithms of social media sites have unfolded over time. Although search engine optimisation companies will never pin down exactly what goes into search algorithms, a study of search results can reveal a lot. Early social media marketing was based on experiment, but is less so as SEO companies discover more about how social media search works

• Search results are a changing landscape. Just as the search engines alter their algorithms to keep ahead of the manipulations of SEO experts, social media sites alter their own methods of ranking results to stay ahead of the game.

This means that it can pay to seek professional advice for all types of optimisation. You can discuss this with us at SEO Consult.

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