Want to know why we know social media isn’t a fad? Because 1. People are obsessed with it and 2. It’s bringing serious traffic to websites. The frontiers for finding information on the web are expanding beyond the search box every day, but as social media matures, the demand for exacting social practices will become increasingly necessary for success across digital channels.
We saw this occur in the search industry when website owners saw the need and benefits of dominating the first page of Google. Increased visibility meant more traffic, and so an industry rose out of nothing to help website owners rise in the search engine rankings. SEO is one of the reasons companies such as Article Writing Services exists and provides free content for websites.
Google tried to benefit from the benefits of search domination by offering paid search advertisements, but this of course, was not enough. For increased benefit website owners started hiring people to manufacture organic rankings and SEO was born.
Today in social media we stand on that exact precipice. Twitter and Facebook have become top 8 generators of traffic to every site I’ve worked with and in cases where the demographic is right, Pinterest is also performing incredibly well. (Women’s magazines are currently seeing more traffic from Pinterest than Twitter.) As social media grows and more marketers jump on board though, the route for newsfeed or pinboard domination is increasingly complicated.
This is a consequence of social media’s rise to maturity. Today only 16 percent of fans are seeing Facebook posts and social channels like Pinterest are sneaking in algorithms that limit people’s ability to dominate the top of specific categories more than once every hour.
Social networks like Facebook want to increase brand visibility through socially driven paid options (just like how Google started offering paid ads), but marketers won’t settle with social advertising. Instead they’ll demand more organic-looking results that help them dominate their niche.
Search engine marketers paved the way for this path long ago when they coerced marketers to carve out a budget for search engine optimization. They taught marketers the language, exchanges, and conventions of domination, and as the power of social discovery expands we will soon see social media optimization will follow in the footsteps of SEO.
These social media optimization experts will communicate with exacting standards designed specifically for every social networks’ individual algorithm from Facebook’s Edgerank to Pinterest’s unnamed categorical top list. When this happens mastering the art and science of social strategy won’t just be about building relationships and connecting with audiences in meaningful ways. The nuances of how each message is delivered for maximum visibility will become increasingly important and it will take a social media optimization expert to keep up.
To add to it all, when these social media optimization experts (or SMO’s) emerge, their efforts won’t simply help marketers increase maximize their presence across social channels. Social signals are also becoming important to search engine rankings, meaning they will help marketers climb to the top of the search engine rankings as well.