ideaLaunch Blog

The two hottest trends in web marketing right now are search engine optimization and social media marketing. As someone who writes a lot of content for the Internet, I usually find that I’m focusing on one strategy or the other, but rarely both at the same time.

So what’s the difference – and how do you know where you should invest your time and money?

The easiest way to explain the difference between search engine marketing and social media campaigns is by comparing how quickly you see results.

SEO writing works, but it usually takes time to see an increase in traffic. No matter how good of a job you do at incorporating keywords into your web content, it takes a while for search engines to notice you. You also need to spend time building links to your content if you want to improve your rankings and subsequent traffic.

In general, it will take longer to see results from search engine optimization, but you’ll likely reap the benefits of your hard work for a much longer period of time with little maintenance.

Social media campaigns, on the other hand, can bring a quick spike in traffic and – hopefully – sales. You can build a contest that you promote through Twitter or Facebook and begin to see results almost immediately.

The down side to social media campaigns is that they have a short shelf life. Twitter and Facebook are constantly being renewed with fresh information and content and it doesn’t take long for your message to get buried by more recent content.

Ideally, you’re working with a content marketing expert who will help you use search engine optimization to reach your long term goals and build a solid foundation for residual traffic AND put together timely social media campaigns to help you with time sensitive promotions.

Britt Reints is a freelance writer living in Orlando.  She’s much more interesting on Twitter than she is on Google.

Tags: optimization, search engines, SEO writing, social media

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 11:16 am and is filed under SEO, optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.