Comparing SEO & Social Media as Marketing Channels

Comparing SEO & Social Media as Marketing Channels: "

Posted by randfish

You may have seen the recent string of posts about SEO vs. Social Media, starting with this effective, but poorly argued controversy-bait, which was excoriated by Elysia Brooker and Hugo Guzman, then followed up with a more nuanced view by Darren Rowse. While I'm not particularly interested (nor do I think there's much value) in re-hashing or arguing these points, I did think the topic warranted attention, as it brings up some excellent points marketers should carefully consider as they invest in their craft.

We Search for What We Want + Need

The search for information and answers has been essential to humans since time immemorial. And there's no sign that our latest iteration, web search, is losing any steam:

Even as we've reached a maturity point with broadband adoption and online population, searches are rising. We're not searching less every month; we're searching more.

Search is an intent driven activity. We don't search casually (much), we search to find answers, information, goods and services to consume. The power of search marketing - whether paid or organic - is simple: Be in front of the consumer at the time of consumption. There's no more effective time to be present and no more effective way of knowing what is desired. All the social graph analysis in the world won't tell you that Sunday evening, I got fed up with my current selection of footwear and, after some searching, spent a few hundred dollars on Zappos. But being front and center when I queried mens puma shoes brought them some nice business.

We're Social to Discover and Share

Social media - whether it's Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Reddit, StumbleUpon or something else - is about connections, interaction, discovery and distraction. We hardly ever use these portals as a way to find answers, though they certainly may provide plenty to unasked questions.

Social media marketing advocates often make the case that social is how we find out about new products on the web, but, at least so far, the data doesn't back up this assertion:

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ATG Study on How Users Discover Products via SearchEngineLand

However, I am strongly inclined to believe the claim that social media is how we find out about new content on the web, particularly when we're not seeking something in particular (as with a search). Blogs, pictures, video, research and the like are surely seeing an increased share of their visits from social, and that branding exposure is definitely valuable.

Some recent GroupM Research helped to shed the light of data on this supposition, noting that:

• The click-through rate in organic search results for users who have been exposed to a brand's social marketing campaign are 2.4X higher than those that haven't; for paid search, it showed a jump from 4.5% to 11.8% (in both cases, this is for branded queries)
• Consumers using social media are 1.7x more likely to search with the intention of making a list of brands or products to consider purchasing compared to those who do not use social media

Ben Yoskovitz talked about this value in his recent analysis:

Based on the information in this report, it’s reasonable to argue that social media marketing can increase the quality of leads (and not just the volume). It’s possible to hone in on, and understand intent through search and how social media exposure affects that intent. And as people are exposed (and I would say involved with – since exposure sounds like you’re just broadcasting stuff at people, which isn’t what social media is about) to social media their intent is more focused and driven towards lead conversion

That's the kind of social media marketing value I can get behind. Get exposed to potential customers through social so that when they build their consideration set, search and purchase, you'll have a leg up on the competition.

What Drives Traffic (and Converts) for Whom

It pays to understand the bias of this flare-up's instigator, and I've got plenty of compelling data myself to see his perspective. Last weekend, I started publishing content on a personal blog - no domain authority, no links and little chance of performing well in search. But the results from social media - Twitter, Facebook and Hacker News in particular - are fairly remarkable:

The search traffic demand, all 78 visits, was generated from the articles that went popular on Twitter & HN. The site itself still doesn't rank for its own name. Yet, social media sent 22,000 visits over 9 days. No wonder bloggers, in particular those that monetize through advertising, sponsorships and other traffic-driven systems, have a proclivity for investing in social traffic. Perhaps it's not so crazy to suggest on Problogger.net, a site about growing blog traffic and improving monetization, that social can be "better" than SEO.

I'd still argue that overall, referring traffic of all kinds sent from social, particularly from the largest network (Facebook), is only a fraction of the visits Google sends out each day (unless you're in the business of appealing to the Facebook audience biases - I was a bit frustrated with how the data was clearly manipulated in the reference piece to fit the story). But, social does eliminate some of the inherent biases that search engines carry and let content that appeals to social users flourish no matter the site's ability to grow its link profile, make content accessible to spiders or effectively target keywords.

Now let's look at an example on the opposite end of the spectrum - conversions for a B2B product.

SEOmoz's PRO membership may not be a good investment unless you're a marketer actively engaged with SEO, but given that both the search and social traffic our site attracts likely fall into this intent group (interested in SEO and likely to be in web marketing), a comparison seems fair.

First, I did some prep work in our Google Analytics account by creating an advanced segment called "social traffic" that contains any referral source with "twitter," "facebook," "stumbleupon," "linkedin," "flickr," and "ycombinator" - these represent the vast majority of our social media sources. Next, I compared this traffic quantitatively with our search referrals over the past two weeks:

• Social Traffic - 26,599 visits from 30 sources
• Organic Search Traffic - 102,349 from 20 sources

I then compared the percent of these reaching our landing or purchase pages for PRO membership. Here's organic search:

And here's social traffic:

Here's what I see:

• 4.5% of organic search visitors considered a purchase
• 1.3% of social traffic considered a purchase
• While I can't disclose full numbers, I can see that a fair number of search visits converted vs. zero for social.

In fact, looking at the entire year to date traffic to SEOmoz from social sources, it appears not 1 visit has ever converted for us. Social may be a great way to drive traffic, build branding and make a purchase more likely in the future, but from a direct conversion standpoint, it doesn't hold a candle to search. To be fair, I'm not looking at full life cycle or even first-touch attribution, which makes this analysis less comprehensive, though likely still directionally informative.

Takeaways

Given the research and data here and in the posts/content referenced, I think we can say a few things about search and social as marketing channels:

1. There shouldn't be a VS.: This isn't about pitting web marketers against each other (or perhaps, more accurately, themselves, since our industry survey data suggests many of us are responsible for both). There's obvious value in both channels and to suggest otherwise is ideological nonsense and worse, self-defeating.
2. Search Converts: $20 Billion+ isn't being wasted on Google's search ads - that sucker send intent-driven, focused, conversion-ready visits like nobody else on the web.
3. Social Has Value: Those exposed to a social campaign are better customers and prospects; making social not only a branding and traffic channel, but an opportunity for conversion rate optimization.
4. SEO Is Hard in the Early Stages: Without a strong link profile, even great content may not perform particularly well in search results.
5. Segmenting Search and Social is Key: Unless you separate, analyze and iterate, you're doomed to miss opportunities and falsely attribute value. I'm particularly worried about those marketers who invest heavily in social to the detriment of SEO because the immediacy of the rewards is so much more tangible and emotionally compelling (He's following me on Twitter! We have 200 Facebook fans!) - make sure appropriate effort goes where it can earn ROI; it's our job.

For another interesting (and more social-media biased) perspective, check out Search vs. Social from Bradford Cross.

I'd love to hear more from you on this topic, too.

7 Insanely Clever Ways To Get Users To Click Your Ads

7 Insanely Clever Ways To Get Users To Click Your Ads: "

In the past couple years, self-serve advertising on Facebook has become significantly more competitive as thousands of advertisers compete for impressions and clicks. To maintain a high click through rate and keep costs down, advertisers need to use creative, attention grabbing images to stand out from the pack. The insight in this article comes from analyzing over 250,000 Facebook ads.



Here are just a few techniques Facebook advertisers are using to get more clicks:

Colorful Backgrounds

The gradient background is a classic, time tested social advertising technique. It may not work for all niches, but it can be extremely effective in getting the attention of certain demographics. And anything bright and colorful will stand out among Facebook’s drab, pale blue interface.

Banners And Badges

I love the use of the word New! in the following ad. Not only is saying “New” a classic marketing technique, but the its design and placement in the lower right corner cleverly draws the eye towards the body of the ad.

Mimic UI Elements

Years of using modern operating systems have conditioned most people to respond in a very specific way to certain graphical elements. For example, we’re trained to draw our attention to a small mouse cursor on the screen. These techniques are controversial, but if you can get them approved, you can benefit from a dramatic increase in CTR. People routinely accomplished 30-50 percent increases in CTR just by overlaying a picture of a small Play arrow(like a YouTube video) on their image. When people see a play button, they just want to click it.

Use buttons and strong calls to action

Even something as simple as adding the text “click here” to an ad image will increase clicks. Having a call to action telling the user what to do next and a (fake) button that lets them do it will all be effective.

Faces are very effective, but sex always sells

In the early days of Facebook Ads, all you had to do was present a picture showing a little cleavage to get massive clicks. They’ve cracked down on how much skin you can show since then, but don’t worry- the right picture of a face can be just as appealing as the sluttiest softcore porn pics. Closeups, especially those images that seem to be staring straight at the user from the page look very effective.

Pictures of cute girls for the men, and of babies for the women work very well. We’re just biologically hardwired by millions of years of evolution to respond to them.

Using Text for the image

It can often be very effective to simply treat the image as more space for your text headline, particularly if you have a strong, clear value proposition with universal appeal that can be expressed in just a few words.

7. Shocking or creepy images

Like a tabloid, you can always rely on shock value. Assuming you can get creepy or weird ads approved, you can get a very good CTR for certain demographics very quickly. These ads probably won’t convert very well, but for some offers or sites where getting clicks as cheap as possible is the objective, this is a valid strategy.

Facebook Launching Gmail Competitor 'Titan' on Monday?

Facebook Launching Gmail Competitor 'Titan' on Monday?: "

It seems like only yesterday that we at Switched were huddled around our monitors, watching Mark Zuckerberg announce the launch of Deals. (It was actually a little over a week ago.) But word has come down from on high that yet another Facebook event will soon be upon us. On Monday, Zuck and crew will once again gather a bunch of nerds in a room -- and even more nerds online, via live-stream -- to announce... something. The invites going around make it pretty clear that the announcement will be focused on the site's messaging products, and rumor has it that Facebook will be launching a full-fledged e-mail service.



According to TechCrunch's sources, next week will see the launch of Facebook's Project Titan, a full-featured Web-mail client that's internally being called a Gmail killer. Users will supposedly get @Facebook e-mail addresses, and we can only assume there will be tight integration with Facebook's photo and event services, the most popular in their respective fields. (Still, TechCrunch says that the service is early in its development, and the version announced next week could be fairly simplistic.) But if Facebook hopes to pry us away from our beloved Gmail accounts, it's going to have unleash something truly mind-blowing.

Facebook Launching Gmail Competitor 'Titan' on Monday? originally appeared on Switched on Fri, 12 Nov 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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another reason why SMB needs on-line marketing!

Real business owners. Real stories. In this landmark documentary series, WebVisible explores The Great Divide - where small businesses and consumers fail to connect.

Last year, WebVisible partnered with Nielsen Online to reveal compelling data showing that consumers and business owners were using the Web to find local products and services, yet business owners were not fully embracing the Web as a marketing tool for their own businesses. Now, we've taken our cameras behind the counters, into the factories, warehouses, shops, and offices of small business America to get total access into the lives, struggles, ideas, and insights of small business owners.

For more info, go to webvisiblemovie.com

The Great Divide from WebVisible on Vimeo.

ROI of social media

How Apple beat Microsoft: catering to the non-geek majority

Apple is now doing so well that it has to explain to the American government why it’s so handily beating its opponents, while Microsoft is now so embarrassed at being surpassed in market cap that it has to explain to its shareholders what it plans to do to right the ship. But while the answer to how Apple managed to grow larger than Microsoft is fairly straightforward, it’s not the answer that immediately comes to mind: sure, Apple’s diversification into everything from music players to cellphones to music sales to tablets has given the company a wider revenue base upon which to capitalize. But Microsoft has also moved into every one of these markets and failed each time, so it’s not as simple as the fact that Apple has broadened its product line. Why is it that the iPod worked and the Zune didn’t? Is it because the iPod came first and cornered the market before the Zune got out the door? If so, then how does one explain the dominance of the iPhone over Windows Mobile phones, when the latter have been around longer? And how about the iPad? Microsoft has wanted to go there for what seems like a decade, and then newcomer Apple steps in and steals the whole market?

Microsoft’s original strategy in the eighties and the nineties, and a highly successful one at that, was to cater to the technology geeks who made the buying decisions on behalf of the non-geek majority. That meant making sure its products were suitable to the corporate IT geeks who not only directly influenced the buying decisions for their companies, but also indirectly influenced the home purchases of their non-geek coworkers who invariably turned to them for advice. And it meant catering to geek technology pundits, upon whom regular non-geek folks also relied upon for buying advice. And man did it ever work when it came to getting people to adopt not only Windows, which was a geek’s warped vision of what a consumer might want in an operating system, but also Office, which represented such a warped vision that it took the concept of typing words on a screen and hitting the print button, what should have been the simplest (and least expensive) task in all of computing, and instead turned word processing into something that cost hundreds of dollars and involved having nineteen toolbars on the screen. And yet the strategy worked so well that it even had non-geek regular people paying for PowerPoint slide show presentation software for their home computer, which they could not possibly ever have a home use for.

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he knew that he was never going to be able to change the geeks’ minds. So instead his strategy was to try to change the game by getting the non-geek majority to stop paying attention to the geeks altogether – and that strategy has taken a long, long time to pay off. Looking back over the years you can see the early incremental stages of it, whether it be something as subtle as offering all in one computers in a choice of colours to get consumers chewing on the possibility that buying a computer might be their decision to make and not that of the local resident geek aka me!, and releasing a portable music player in the iPod whose interface was so drop dead simple that even the most technology averse among the population couldn’t come up with a reason to be intimidated by it.

As consumers have grown to trust Apple to offer products that are actually aimed at them instead of the geeks, the company has grown progressively bolder in its moves by offering products like the iPhone, a smartphone which, while still being straightforward in its functionality, offered a far more sophisticated array of features. And because the public trusted that the product would be geared toward them instead of being geared toward the computer store salesmen of the world, they bought in.

Meanwhile Microsoft has continued to offer up one geek’s warped vision of a consumer product after another. While the Zune was a similar product to the iPod, the difference between the two was akin to someone who could speak the language vs. someone who was only capable of making gibberish noises which sort of sounded like the language; consumers saw the Zune for the faux-consumer product that it was and stayed away. The same goes for every new failed cellphone that Microsoft has launched in the hopes of staving off the mobile marketshare it’s been losing to the iPhone over the past three years. Ironically, Microsoft’s problem is that because the vast majority of consumers are current or former Windows users, they know first hand just how unsuitable Microsoft’s products are for consumers – and even if they’re still using Windows it’s only because they think they have to, and they’re not about to expand their reliance on Microsoft products one inch more than they absolutely must.

So now that a new sequel in the Apple vs. Microsoft saga is about to begin playing out after the current plotline ended with Apple catching up to Microsoft and becoming an equal sized company, there’s every reason to believe that the current trend will continue to play out in the next chapter of the two companies’ decades-long battle. For Microsoft to regain momentum it would have to suddenly gain an understanding of what consumers actually want and figure out how to speak that language, but that’s just not part of Microsoft’s DNA and never has been. They’d need a new outside CEO, for starters, but the problem is that there’s only ever been one CEO in the history of consumer technology who’s understood how to give consumers what they want and had the guts to do so at the expense of riling up the geeks, and he’s already running Apple. It’s no coincidence that the one and only market in which Microsoft is seeing growth is that of hard core gaming with its Xbox, one of the few consumer technology markets that’s still dominated by geeks, for the simple reason that most gamers are geeks.

While Microsoft is now left to its own devices to come up with a strategy for getting consumers enthusiastic about its offerings, the company surprisingly no longer has any momentum left on its side at all. Even the geeks have given up the Microsoft ghost – and no, the geeks haven’t turned to Apple, which they largely view as the devil for making technology “too easy” and taking all their power away; no, the geeks have turned to Google, whose unofficial mission statement now consists of trying to turn back the hands of time back to that era in which the geeks were calling all the shots. And while it’s incredibly unlikely that Google will be able to pull that off, at least the company has a strategy. Microsoft, on the other hand? The company recently announced that it’s now going to focus on products – which begs the question of just what it is that they’ve been focusing on for the past three decades.

In hindsight, while a quick surmising of the two companies’ histories will leave you scratching your head as to how Apple could now possibly be a larger company than Microsoft, a closer inspection is likely to leave one wondering how it is that it took Steve Jobs thirteen entire years to pull off, considering the competition. The real question now is whether Apple continues to keep its foot on the consumer-oriented gas pedal now that it’s won this stage of the battle.

Social media Video (update)