Social Media Marketing vs. SEO – The Great Debate

With online marketing, there’s a debate raging among experts over which strategy is best to grow your business.  Let’s start by ensuring your understand the difference between the two.
 
Social media marketing: Social media marketing is about building relationships and brand awareness while engaging with your audience on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn.
 
Search engine optimization (SEO): is about showing up in Google search results for your audience's search queries.

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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 business.
 
Similarly, there are those who focus their attention entirely on building a social media following without spending any time on SEO.
 
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. 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.
 
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.