All social marketers are in the eyeballs business. In essence, we want to have our content be seen by a critical mass of people/customers in order to effectively communicate our message. The process boils down to these three basics of content manipulation: creating, seeding and pitching.
Notice something missing from that statement? Optimization. Content needs to be created to fit the current formatting system utilized by social bookmarking, search engines and other methods of sharing. If you don't carefully create content with these key tenets in mind? You might not want to bother creating the content in the first place.
Great content is only great if people see it.
SEO can't be neglected in this equation. Search is getting smarter. However, it isn't smart enough to find and discern the best content. It's a robot. Search is designed to find the best optimized content. It doesn't make sense to create content that can't be found. Unfortunately, SEO is overlooked far too often and people continue to fall into this trap.
Optimization can't be an afterthought anymore. The numbers, money and time invested are to important for a valuable tool like this to be neglected due to a lack of understanding.
It isn't a crime to pay for media.
Search is a great example of this. Social is the land of the "free content" and "organic triumph" right? Wrong. Most social programs work only if you have a critical mass of people. How else are you going to find these people unless you do effective outreach, create paid semantic ads, and optimize several articles about your new initiatives? You can't.
Community creation/build time is not something that will be accepted by most companies who are used to the campaign mindset. Therefore, in order to balance community integrity with raised expectations? You need to embark on social buys in order to seed, optimize and get the word out about your community and content.
Link-building is another easy win for social marketers. (Although this is best if done with someone who is far more knowledgeable.) Half the battle? Just knowing who to ask and how to do effective outreach. PR people should think of linking opportunities the same way they would press mentions. It's just a different demographic.
The deeper you dive into search and social? The more you realize how similar and dependent they each are to one another.
Photo Credit: Dunechaser
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tagged as eyeballs business, paid social media, search is social, semantic social advertising, semantic social search, social marketing, social media campaign, social search
