I’ve been keeping an eye on Social Media for the past few years. It’s a buzzword for sure, and along with things like “User Generated Content” (UGC) and blogs, wikis and everything else, has become a major component for many company’s marketing.

However, most people just simply don’t understand it. Why is it so important? Is it more important than Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

SEO

This is simply (although it is not simple) making a website/page better for search engines to index and therefore bump up the page in the search engines (almost always Google) for specific keywords. It’s been a good earner for some people (mostly Google actually) for years, but it’s always smacked of slightly underhand if you ask me.

In my opinion, it’s important to optimise a website for SEO, but if that’s the only strategy, then frankly, you’re deluded.

Social Media

Social Media is essentially about generating and being involved in conversations. Mostly this is online and out of your control, but it’s becoming clear that it is an achievable goal to try to generate positive conversations and also keep an ear to the ground regarding negativity.  Dealing with those situations is nowhere near as simple as SEO and anyone that says it is, is lying.

Social Networks are all the rage, with getting pages on Facebook and applications, as well as the now obligatory twitter profile, but the interesting thing that most people are interested in is numbers of people.

Social Media is not about numbers

It’s about conversations. If you are aiming to get 10,000 followers on Twitter and 25,000 fans on your facebook page, good luck to you, but you’re probably barking up the wrong tree.

Focussing your energies on generating conversations will have much more of an effect than just numbers ever could. Getting people talking is much harder than bumping up numbers.

Conclusion

SEO is about ranking on Google and that’s fine. But Social Media is about amount of conversations and managing those conversations. Very very different.