If your content is not original, entertaining, engaging, or otherwise informative, then why share? Tweeting weak content is anti-social!
What could be more anti-social than spamming friends with bad content? It is like inviting the “wrong” people to your party. You violate the unspoken social contract that underlies our relationships and you pay the price. So, rumors of the death of SEO and good content are greatly exaggerated.
As Brian Clark blogs: ”In the end, both social media and SEO each have their own benefit. Social media channels provide the opportunity to share content in real time. SEO on the other hand builds a more long-term foundation that is available whenever someone is searching using your keywords.” [ Read Original Source ]
So really social media offers a distribution network for your permanent content, it provides incentive to build more relationships, communities of interest, etc. But social media content, typically 140 characters or less, can be valuable as content all the same with one significant constraint – the relevance of social media content is short lived. The opposite of this is the SEO longevity and reference-able nature of web sites and blogs:
“As long as your site is hosted, your page(s) will appear in search results for the terms you’re targeting. Social media on the other hand isn’t so permanent for starters, not all of your followers may see what you post since social media channels, especially Twitter, are in real-time. Meaning if you post something at 3:00 but your followers don’t login until 8:00, they may not see what you’ve done.” [ Read Original Source ]
You might say that social media content is perishable. It has a very short half-life. The takeaways here are the following:
(1) Curate good content for your social network
(2) Be a source of original content, unique perspective (it is about discovery not search)
(3) Provide value to your readers – either real-time (social) or permanent content (SEO)
These are indeed all elements of a good content marketing and communication strategy. It all takes time and energy, that is why we call it work and that is also why we have software to make the work load lighter.
Enough for now… Off we go!
