Marketing approaches and philosophies have continued to shift over time to remain relevant to the masses. Technology in recent decades has played a vital role in bringing a lot of changes to companies and businesses worldwide, resulting in new viable marketing efforts.
From billboards to magazines and from newspapers to television, we are now currently living in an era where smartphones, the internet, and social media have become the most popular platforms for marketers.
According to a recent report by HubSpot, nearly 64% of marketers invest their efforts in SEO (search engine optimization). In comparison, 84.13% of social media accounts are being managed by company owners. This goes to show just how impactful these two platforms have become.
Hence the question naturally arises which one is better? To answer that, let’s compare the two and find out about their limitations and advantages.
Social Media vs. SEO: What’s the Difference & Which is Right For My Business?
Learn the differences between social media and SEO to decide who would win the battle to produce the highest marketing returns.
1. Promotion Through Social Media
Social media is about connecting, building relationships, and getting traffic from social media networks. It strengthens the middle of the funnel and creates engagement.
Helps You Know an Audience & Intent
Social media has quickly transformed into a marketing platform for many ventures because it offers them a ton of opportunities to develop and construct customer engagements and foster interaction. However, social media users have weak intent to buy.
Stirring An Emotional Response
Businesses can increase their brand awareness, bring in more inbound traffic, and improve their conversion rates by talking about trending topics that can stir an emotional response such as anxiety, anger, and amazement.
Better Insights
When you execute social media marketing adequately, it can promote customer satisfaction and nurture brand loyalty. Not only is social media relatively less expensive than other forms of marketing, but it can also provide you with a lot of marketable insights as well as raise your thought leadership in the industry.
Issues With Measuring Success Outcomes
While there are a lot of tools available today to help you measure your impact on social media, for newbies and amateurs measuring performance can prove to be a tad bit difficult. Secondly, social media platforms promote conversations and interactions in a relaxed and free manner which some businesses might consider a bit inappropriate.
This is why businesses that require a more serious and urgent tone can only use social media as a side platform and not their main virtual real estate for business.
The Possibility Of Negative Feedback
Social media also opens up doors for a lot of negative feedback that can tarnish your name, and this can be fueled and backed by competitors as well as rivals within the industry. Managing social media for a business is a full-time duty.
Need To Stay Active 24/7
It needs committed efforts, dedicated time, and an unwavering drive to stay continuously active and keep audiences engaged. Plus, every social media account has its own privacy regulations and other policies which need to be followed.
2. Promotion Through SEO
SEO is about being discovered and getting traffic through search engine rankings. It fills the top of the funnel and creates awareness.
Research-Based Content Works Well
Detailed guides and articles that answer questions work best here. Long posts from a reliable online essay writer can be a better option. Try to add classic evergreen topics that never go out of fashion to your list.
Helps You Get Higher Leads
Visitors from search are more likely to act. Further study shows that SEO promotion can be primarily used to generate leads for businesses as inbound strategies and seem to be quite successful for B2B and B2C organizations.
Less Pricey
You can also benefit from lower advertising costs as compared to other traditional mediums. Additionally, tracking success is much easier and cost-effective.
New Marketing-Friendly Features
Nowadays, we have SEO tactics that specifically target smartphone users by making websites mobile-friendly. SEO can take you ahead of the competition by offering you a long term marketing strategy that helps you gain a bigger market share and synergizes all of your marketing activities online.
It’s Relatively Slow
Progress with this method is slow and uncertain. It can take a long time for pages to get ranked.
For some businesses, SEO may not be a practical solution because it may bring unwanted attention in the form of competitors and rivals who are always ready to steal your ideas.
Higher Scrutiny
Google has raised its bar on scruntinizing for black hat SEO and penalizes sites quickly. Moreover, organic marketing through SEO can be slow at times and can take 3-6 months to show positive results.
Lack Of Control
When conducting SEO, your online business is at the mercy of algorithms used by search engines, and you have absolutely no control over them. Eventually, testing and targeting audiences can become tiresome. Plus, for onetime events and demand generation, SEO needs support from other platforms to get things working in your favor.
3. Comparative Analysis of Social Media vs. SEO
To conduct a comparative analysis, we need to associate parameters that are similar for SEO and Social Media to make sure that they are judged equally. Hence I will analyze both for related aspects to make sure the evaluation is as fair and unbiased as possible.
Eight Points To Consider
- As far as content goes, social media thrives on emotional responses, whereas SEO is based on user-generated queries and research.
- Popular and best-performing media for social platforms are visuals and images, whereas, for SEO, long-form written text performs best.
- Social media targets audiences based on who they are, whereas SEO focuses on people’s trends and what they are thinking.
- Conversion likelihood for both social media and SEO is high, while the former promotes the sharing of information, and the latter is almost ready to purchase.
- When it comes to speed, social media has the ability to go viral and produce instant results, while SEO takes time for search engines to crawl and index your pages.
- Upper limits for social media show no concern for continuing to grow, while for SEO, online traffic generated can never exceed the total number of searches made for a phrase online.
- In terms of effort and longevity, social media platforms offer shorter exposure and require continuous effort, whereas SEO can produce ongoing passive visitors and rankings that can endure for weeks/months or longer.
- Reporting and measurement for social media can prove to be difficult, whereas, for SEO, it is much more straightforward.
Hence one can say that while both social media and SEO are extensively used by marketers these days, the former requires more effort and time but can also produce more significant results although they can be short-lived. On the other hand, SEO may prove to be slow to deliver results initially.
SEO can provide you with results for a more extended period outlasting your social media efforts. Speaking about results, if you need support to enter a new varsity to pursue a qualification you always dreamed about, consider taking personal statement help from professionals online to improve your chances.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that both social media and SEO are interdependent on each other. By sharing your social media accounts and their links on your website, you can drive traffic to them. Moreover, social media can help you divert traffic to your online stores and websites.
