Social Media Platforms Are About Traffic and Relationships and Not About SEO

Using Social Media Platforms Correctly

Lately all I hear is how Social Media is the best way to boost your SEO efforts. This is true, but this has been true for about 2 years.

I have even wrote about this in a few posts in the past.

Back then it was all about Twitter and Facebook giving you that SEO boost. social-media-platforms

Today it’s more about Google+ and Facebook and Twitter is a soft third.

The mistake I see many people making is focusing too much on the SEO benefits of Social Media platforms.

If that is your main focus, then you are making a BIG mistake!

Last week my man Joseph asked me a to join a conversation he was having on Facebook about this exact topic.

Since Joe and I had this chat on Skype a few days before and since I’m a charitable guy I joined in.

I always have 2 cents to share

The Talk

Basically he talked about how much of a benefit is Social Media shares on your SEO.

My exact answer was…

“Yea, I don’t think it’s as big a factor as people make it out to be. Not saying I would stop the effort, but maybe focus it more on G+. “plus 1′s” and see how that really helps. But at the end of the day the social traffic and relationships is the point of all this social fun right? lol”

Then I said…

“1000% Agree that social media is about the traffic and relationships FIRST. You may never get to a level where social shares benefit your search results, but you will most def will get to a place where social traffic and relationships are benefiting you on a daily basis.”

Now, I said this because for me, I get a good amount of shares from social media platforms and I have for over 3 years. I do rank well for many keywords, but the truth is, I am also being beat by MANY sites that couldn’t get a social share to save their life.

Social shares are important and I do believe that it helps your SEO efforts at some point.

But I don’t know for sure and neither does anyone else.

Ex: I know Google looks at page load time as a signal in search ranks, but when I took the Money Dummy Blog from a page load time of 13 sec to about 2-4 sec, I didn’t see any difference in my ranks over the past 2 months at all.

Do I know for sure if it helps? NO.. but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.

Social Media shares are the same!

Are they important for SEO? YES!

Should you ONLY focus on that? NO!

So this conversation got me thinking to what people should be really focusing on when they use social media.

What DO I Focus On?

Social Media platforms are all about getting traffic to your blog or website, branding you or your blog and building relationships!

Traffic and relationships you can measure, you can see the results, when it comes to SEO, things get much harder to see if what is working.

As a newbie or for those “Gurus” when you use Social Media correctly you will quickly see more traffic coming to your blog, you will start to connect with more and more people starting from day one.

When will you see the SEO benefits of Social Shares?

Let’s say the magic numbers for Social Media shares to help your SEO are:

50 re-tweets
20 facebook likes/shares
5 google+ 1′s

You know as well as I do, getting this many shares is not easy and for most bloggers they will never see those share number!

So why focus on something that won’t benefit you for a long time or may never benefit you?

Focusing on driving traffic and building relationships will start to benefit you in your first week. SEO benefits may take 6-12 months if not longer to benefit you.

Not hard for me to see where your focus should be

As that picture above shows, anything can be made to look a certain way online, but that doesn’t mean it’s real.

Tags: social media, social media marketing, social media platform, social media platforms, social media shares, social media sharing, social media sites, social media success

http://trucklicense.net/get-cdl Freedom Jackson
Excellent advice. Do you think G+ success will hurt facebook or twitter more?
http://www.johnpaulaguiar.com John Paul
I don’t think G+ will have any effect on Twitter or Facebook to me they are all 3 completely different platforms.
http://onlineincometeacher.com/ Matt Smith
Great post John! Totally agree that more people should put more emphasis on the ‘social’ aspect of social media. Yes, it can help SEO, but like you say, it’s building relationships that count.
http://www.esacramentomarketing.com/ ThinkNewMedia
I think the best chance of having social media work for SEO is the possibility someone will find an article useful and link to it. Getting backlinks by having your content be more “discoverable” is where the benefit is. I haven’t seen anybody move the ranking meter via RT’s. Likes or +1′s, and rightfully so. If it did, people would be selling RT’s, Likes and +1′s…oh wait they already do. Good stuff as always JP .
http://www.StadiaStudio.com/ Mike Allton
I completely agree that Social marketing needs to be Social first. However, when speaking to small business owners, one often needs to provide several benefits to an activity before they will commit. If you can tell them that social media marketing will allow them to connect to customers AND it will improve their SEO, they’re more likely to get on board, and will truly benefit from your marketing efforts on both fronts.
http://www.johnpaulaguiar.com John Paul
Exactly Matt.. focus on what will benefit you fastest and the most and hope that you reach a place where you beni in SEO too.
http://www.johnpaulaguiar.com John Paul
haha I agree Joe
http://www.johnpaulaguiar.com John Paul
Mike telling a new client or business that is mis-information man. Knowing that they most likely will NEVER see the SEO beniis.. Stay with the normal benefits to SM and they will see it as somthing they need to be doing.
http://www.StadiaStudio.com/ Mike Allton
Misinformation? Not according to Google and SEO experts. According to Google, “On average, search ads with annotations have a 5-10% uplift in click through rate and the AdWords Social Extension helps you show more of them.”
That’s just one of the many ways Google is integrating social media with search scores. I hope you aren’t under the impression that Google +1′s are just there for fun.
Of course, any benefit must be measured and reported, and social media efforts to increase leads, traffic and sales should be measured just as any good SEO campaign would be.
http://www.johnpaulaguiar.com John Paul
Yes the social shares are important but like I shared in the psot.. for you to see any benefits in SEO from social shares will take a logn time. and we don’t know at what number the shares have to be to be a benefit. If the share is 50 tweets and 10 g+ 1.. how can you tell a NEW small biz that they will benefit in the SEO part if it takes huge effort to reach those shares?
So yes misinformation man. Telling them they will benefit in something they may never reach
http://nickkellet.com/ Nick Kellet
They are different for sure, but we have finite attention. It’s going to be interesting to watch Google apply all its force behind G+
iancleary
Social Media can be about SEO in a round about way! You build relationships through twitter with real people that run large blogs that are relevant to your industry and then over time pitch the idea of guest posting.
Building business is all about relationships and social media is the best way building relationships with people all around the world that you can’t pop in for a coffee with.
I met this cool guy called John Aguiar through twitter!
http://www.johnpaulaguiar.com John Paul
Nick, I’m not saying to forget the benefits to SEO.. trust me I know they are there and G+ is where most of that attention is going,. My issue is with people focusing so much attention on it when they are missing the point and real power of SM and that is def in the traffic driving abilities and relationships.
But I agree, I look forward to seeing how G pimps their service even more then they have haha
http://www.johnpaulaguiar.com John Paul
haah Thank Ian. Yea I am not talking about SEO benefits that way, since to me that is more of a benefit to the relationships you build. I am talkign about SEO benefits as in the shares your posts get that help them out rank others. We know it is there, we know it is a factor and we know it is powerful.. but focusing to much on that and forgetting the real reason you jumped on SM is a mistake.
Also like I mentioned in the post.. many bloggers will never get to a share amount that will ever impact their SEO,, so why stress?
Focus on what you will beni from and that is traffic and relationships that lead to connecting with great peeps like you my friend.