It’s long been held that social media marketing and search engine optimization are mutually exclusive – one has nothing to do with the other. Tweets on Twitter or public messages on Facebook have up until now been the exclusive domain of those sites. The only people who could see those messages were friends of the person or company that posted them.
But that’s changing thanks to some new licensing deals between social networking sites and major search engines. Bing is partnering with both Twitter and Facebook to include public content for crawling and indexing. And Twitter has also secured a deal with Google to include their updates in general search results.
What does this mean for online marketers and SEO professionals?
These developments are indeed pioneering a new world in search engine marketing. Content from social media sites will now play an increasingly large role in driving traffic to your website. No longer are these two forms of online marketing exclusive to one another.
Eventually, search will become even more personalized to each user based on their social media activity and their friends’ activity. All of SEO things we talk about here will still be very important but having a strong social media presence will now take on a more critical role in building traffic from search engine results.
As illustrated by this slide from HubSpot, social media will now become just as important as content creation and inbound links to building search engine rankings. Expect social networking analysis to become an integral part of search engine ranking algorithms going forward.
Search engine marketing firm SEO Advantage invites you to learn more about social media marketing and how it can be an effective tool to help you reach more people online at our SEO knowledge center.