SEO vs. Social Media Marketing for Academic Branding – Which is Better?
In my live videos across LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook I talk a lot about creating content and building your SEO. I also talk a lot about using social media as a critical tool to increasing your visibility, authority and income. But which should you focus on while building your academic brand and why does it matter? With online marketing, there’s a debate raging among experts over which strategy is best to grow your brand or business.
Would SEO or social media marketing be the better option?
Often, businesses will hire an SEO expert or agency to increase their visibility in the search engines without even thinking about social media and the traffic that it can bring to their brand and/or business.
Similarly, there are those who focus their attention entirely on building a social media following without spending any time on SEO. This is a huge mistake.
Let’s compare both strategies to see which option is best.
Targeting an Audience
To bring in relevant traffic and sales, it’s important to be able to target a specific audience. That’s why you frequently hear me talk about the importance of a brand statement as well as having social media objective to guide your content. It is definitely easier to target an appropriate audience on social media platforms.
Most social media platforms allow you to create ads that specifically target people within a certain demographic who will be interested in your niche. I do not coach Power Your Research clients to jump into social media ads until they are further along in phase 3 of the program and already reaching major financial goals consistently.
SEO is not quite as targeted. Although you can certainly target those interested in your niche, you generally cannot target a specific demographic.
How Much Effort Is Involved?
To ensure a return on investment, you’ll want to consider how much effort is required to promote your content via social media and SEO.
With social media, you’ll have to plan and post regular content on the various platforms. While there are tools available that can make this process easier, you still have to do this on a consistent basis.
Social media marketing is not something that you can rely on to work without your own efforts. Each post you make will only have a short shelf life, so you’ll need to make an effort each day.
SEO, on the other hand, will require work, but once you start to rank your web pages, there will be less ongoing work involved.
Which Content Should You Use?
Whether you are performing SEO or social media marketing, you’ll need to create content. The type of content you create will make a big impact on your traffic and whether your audience engages with it or not.
When writing content for your website or blog, usually long-form content will work best. This means that you may need to create articles of a few thousand words, rather than a couple of hundred.
For social media, images and videos will work best and will be shared across the community if they resonate with the audience. When this occurs and your content starts to be shared, you’ll also see an increase in traffic to your website.
So, Which is Better – SEO or Social Media Marketing?
You’ll see the most benefits from incorporating both SEO and social media marketing into your branding efforts. © Power Your Research www.poweryourresearch.com
Write long articles and embed images and videos into your content. Doing this will increase engagement and time spent on your website, therefore showing the search engines that your content is good and can be trusted. Plus, people will share content on social media that they find to be interesting and valuable.
Search engines nowadays use social media as a ranking factor, so it’s worth building your social media presence as it will help with your SEO. Building traffic via SEO to your website will also help people to engage on social media too.
So, while SEO and social media marketing are different, they each help the other and the end goal of both is the same – to help increase traffic to your website, products, or services so that you increase your visibility, authority and income.
The answer is easy: do both!
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