SEO vs Social Networking

Posted at June 6, 2007

There has been a major market shift in internet marketing from Search Engine placement to Social Networking in the past couple years, and for many reasons. SEO isn’t reliable, plain and simple. You can be #1 one day, then #9,882,341 the next day. And companies spend thousands – often tens of thousands – a year to maintain these rankings. Rules for ranking are different between search engines. What works on Yahoo! won’t always work on Google or MSN.

With the spread of Social Networking, it’s not about placement anymore. It’s about who you know and can connect with. Take MySpace for example: if you have 100,000 buddies and send a buddy-wide bulletin, your bulletin will be seen (for the most part) by all 100,000 people on your buddy list. This leads to an economical and effective means of mass marketing. Not only is it cheap, but it can be highly targeted, by aiming at an audience of a specific gender and age range in a specific state with specific hobbies.

Granted, the quality of traffic can be defended when using SEO methods, but the same can be said with the targeted audiences gained through social networking sites. In the end, how long until Social Networking becomes the primary means of advertising and Search Engines are demoted to third wheel?