By Chris Crum - Thu, 03/26/2009 - 16:22

SEO Benefits of Twitter, Facebook, Etc.

We hear a whole lot of talk about social media marketing these days. There is plenty of evidence that there are great benefits to this medium, but there are still many questions about it as well. What  questions do you have?

I thought it would be interesting to explore social media and how it relates directly to search engine optimization. I sent a couple of questions to several online marketing experts to get their thoughts on the subject. So contained here are the thoughts of Todd Malicoat, Joe Griffin, Joe Whyte, and Stephen Pitts.

Chris Crum: Where does social media fit into the SEO equation?

Todd Malicoat: Social media is an integral portion of a successful SEO campaign in the current landscape. Social media marketing helps mainly with creating the global link popularity that is essential to high rankings.  Successful social media distribution of high value content has helped to solve the issue of not having enough unique linking domains or global link popularity, which has traditionally been one of the most difficult SEO variables to succeed at.

Joe Whyte: Social media is great as one piece of the Internet marketing puzzle, so is SEO for that matter. The links, traffic, brand engagement and conversational marketing piece to social media is very powerful. Selling it as a stand alone service has always created some issues for me as it takes time and it does not reap the same rewards for clients as quickly and securely as traditional SEO. It is great to do a linkbait piece and get to the top of Digg and see all of that traffic come through but all clients are looking for is a return that affects their bottom line and they want to be able to equate a certain campaign to that success. Social media has always had problems in that regard. Converting Digg and StumbleUpon users to sales is just NOT realistic for every company and every site owner out there.

As the social web evolves, this hole will be filled and is already starting to be filled by the development of more social networking, bookmarking and sharing sites.

In my opinion, the best social media marketing tactics to fit into your online marketing campaigns would be researching who you need to target then cross reference that criteria against the different social sites in order to quantify for yourself and your client that you are targeting the right sites. Then building a presence while engaging users and creating unique and interesting content for that community is the best method.

By doing this you create brand awareness, ubiquity and engagement which is the ultimate goal. Social media marketing is great for targeting the same demographics but just on a different platform away from your traditional search engine results pages.

Joe Griffin: Building a presence in the social web is all about reputation and branding. Most of the web’s top ranking websites maintain strong brand recognition in their respective industries. Strong branding leads to natural inbound links, and this is the lesson to be learned about building a reputation within social media networks. Most of the major social networks like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter, purposely nofollow or truncate outbound links. This strategy drastically cuts down spam in their networks, and improves their quality and relevancy in the major search engines.

So, simply building profiles and linking to your site won’t help. If you’re interested in leveraging social media portals to improve your website’s rankings, then you need to look at the strategy in a completely different light. First and foremost, participating in the social web means building brand recognition, which can be used for your personal brand, your business brand, or both. It’s the brand recognition that leads to improved linking to your website - it’s not the social media websites themselves that will give your website link popularity. The inbound links will come from bloggers, forum moderators and users, resource websites, and new friends and colleagues that you will meet along the way.

Social networks build brands. Brand building is the key to top rankings over the long haul. Recent updates by Google, including the Vince update validate these comments.

Stephen Pitts: Social media is a form of offsite promotion, just like link building. A quality link doesn’t only come from any site, but one that is relevant and has visibility to engines and users, as should a social media effort. As with a SEO campaign, a social media effort should not be considered a project, rather a process that is continual. It can be one of the most effective means to entice users to speak and share online what you offer along with what is great and not so great about you.

Chris Crum: Strictly from an SEO standpoint, what are the benefits to using Twitter, Facebook, etc.?

Todd Malicoat: I’ve honestly yet to have someone show me a great SEO use for Facebook.  There is certainly potential for distribution through it though, based on the raw size of the user base.  With either medium, and with ANY social medium - the goal is simple for SEO’s: high distribution of top level content so it gets well linked.

The traffic will ultimately help with this, and having traffic from the right people (namely webmasters and promiscuous linkers) will help immensely with this.  Twitter, on the other hand, HAS been a fairly valuable SEO tool in the same way that Facebook isn’t.  It helps to get your best content in front of the people that will want it in a very timely fashion.

Sidenote: Watch our exclusive interview with Todd and Brent Csutoras from SES NY last year where they talk about social media platforms:

One main consideration with twitter should be that most people are not engaged.  To truly use twitter as a means for distribution, you need to have very engaging, or very specialized content.  “Cat blogging” (random posts about whatever is on your mind) didn’t work for regular blogging, and people have seem to forgotten this rule when it comes to microblogging.  If you’re going to use twitter, stay on topic at least MOST of the time in order to keep the increasingly distracted attention of your users.

Joe Whyte: Well with the nofollow tags on these sites the link value can be debated. I tend to think that link value is still passed but at a much lower value. We also know that these links do get picked up and put into Google’s and Yahoo’s backlink checker and we know that nofollow still allows spiders to cache and index, which is still great.

There have actually been case studies out there for people who build nofollow back links to terms and it has been documented that there have been shifts within the rankings. However I mostly use Twitter, Facebook and similar sites to build a targeted community that I could market to. Also it’s another great way to open up a “connection line” with potential or current customers. It is also a great way to do some reputation management - We saw this with Rebecca Kelly of SEOmoz and I think it was Verizon or something. She was unhappy and decided to tweet it to all of her friends. A Verizon rep contacted her through twitter and helped her out where a telephone customer rep did not.

This is a great example of social media for reputation management.  One more way Twitter and Facebook can help with SEO is through a method I call parasitic hosting. Parasitic hosting is the process of creating pages on social sites and 3rd party sites that you do not own and building an optimized page for your business. This page has the ability to rank for a particular term through traditional SEO techniques and can be another way to dominate your SERPS!

Sidenote: Watch an exclusive WebProNews interview with Joe from SMX West 2008 when he discussed social media with Mike McDonald:

Stephen Pitts: Twitter and Facebook are a means for traffic and plant seeds that will hopefully turn into links and spur additional traffic. The other way is to use these platforms to find out what/how people find you and want to find you. Social Media is similar to organic visibility, it provides an opportunity to get a click, but the delivery is so important because if it isn’t delivered correctly it might not be seen!

Wrapping up

I’d like to thank Malicoat, Whyte, Griffin, and Pitts for taking the time to discuss this subject with me. I think while social media marketing is certainly a hot topic. Its relationship to search engine optimization is not discussed as often. Certainly that’s not what the medium is all about, but marketers looking for all possible angles and benefits should be able to keep in mind the effects that pertain to search engine rankings.

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by Joe Whyte

Here is another interview from our SES series. This one is with Todd Malicoat, aka stuntdubl, one of the leading SEM experts in the industry. Todd is currently working on two very interesting projects, SEO Class and MarketMotive (be sure to check them out, if you haven’t already). Joe caught up with Todd in San Jose to talk about SEM industry, training, its future and its current image. Enjoy!

SMS: So, Todd, you’ve got a couple of projects that you’re working on right now, Marketing Motive and SEO Class. How are those going?

Todd: Very good. We just had our second SEO Class in New York and had a pretty good turnout. We are going to be doing another one in LA. I forget the exact dates, but it’s on SEOclass.com. All the info is there.

The other one, MarketMotive, just got started. We are planning to push that out. We have about 4 or 5 experts now in different areas. It’ll be more online-based training so it’ll be podcasts, and stuff over PowerPoint and kind of more premium types of training.

SMS: So do they get a certification at the end?

Todd: We’re looking at that. For the most part now we just want solid and trusted information from the people that have good reputations, and then taking it a step beyond what you would see on the regular blog.

SMS: Speaking to that, there have been a lot of classes and training courses. There are even actual college courses starting to offer something like this. It seems to me there is going to be a definitive line between the people that know what they are doing through experience and those who learn something through these courses. What is your opinion on that?

Todd: It’s been pretty easy traditionally for anyone to just throw up a website and say “I do SEO,” and I’m guilty of that myself. Four or five years ago I did the same thing. I said “today I’m going to do SEO.” I put up my website and became an SEO. It’s a self-fulfilling prophesy. And anybody can do that.

There is really no regulation within the industry, which is fine, but it is kind of self-policing at the same time. Having gone to a couple of conferences, you find out who knows what they are doing and who is just BS’ing all the time. It really started as a handful of guys, first PubCon and SES – just small groups of people. And a lot of those same guys are still around and are still practicing. And then they went off and taught a handful of people, and it has sort of grown from there.

From what I found, it’s about the people who are really active in the community and have a high respect for the community, learning all it’s about instead of just going in and saying “teach me how to redirect subdomains and cloak.” There are some people that come in and certainly do that. But it’s more of a trust-based community than that. It is those people that learn that who will end up doing well and succeeding.

SMS: One thing I would be concerned with in the upcoming years of this particular industry is that a lot of businesses are not going to differentiate between those two types of people.

Todd: And going in, a lot of times they don’t. And that’s what’s unfortunate. That’s why people have bad experiences. And some people learn from those experiences and try to search for better ways to find an SEO. And some don’t. They just walk away and say “it’s a terrible industry, it sucks.”

One cool technique is just to ask 10 SEOs who they would suggest if they were too busy. A lot of the best SEOs are going to be busy and they will be happy to do that. That’s a good way to learn who’s good and trustworthy.

SMS: That’s a really good point for businesses that are looking to do SEO. Obviously, if they are signing up for something like SEO Class or any of these others, they know they have been started by people that founded the industry. That definitely adds a level of credibility.

Todd: Yeah, I get so many requests and as much as I want to work with everybody, I can’t. The more that I work with somebody, train somebody one-on-one or on a company basis, the more it takes away from self projects and other clients. You have to be picky. Whereas with SEO Class or MarketMotive, we can teach a whole lot of people at one time, which I enjoy.

SMS: I know that you’re really branded as a link guy and I know I’ve talked to you tons of times about links. What do you think of Pownce, Twitter, and sites like that? Do you see any link value from these sites?

Todd: I don’t see a lot in terms of link value. It’s probably similar to the other social media sites as a distribution point to push your content out to, then get it linked to from the decent places. That would be the main value, I think. With a lot of the Web 2.0 stuff in general, the users are so fickle. Everybody was on Twitter and then Pownce comes along and everybody jumps over to Pownce and leaves Twitter.

A lot of Web 2.0 sites just go for the traffic, where SEO is kind of the opposite of that. Yeah, we might want the traffic but my first question generally always is “what’s the business model? Where are we going to make our money here?” It’s kind of the opposite with those communities.

Nine times out of ten, generally one of my very first questions is where are you guys making your money. And it’s a touchy question. That’s like asking someone his religion or political beliefs. But you got to get right to it, otherwise you’re wasting everybody’s time.

SMS: Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Todd. Good luck with your ventures.

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