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This is a great article, thanks for writing it.
I have found clients don't like social media because they cannot track direct sales like an adwords campaign & such. Getting clients to utilize the social media is a challenge.

The real power of social media is communication but it is also in the quality of the conversation. Local businesses can especially use this effectively because it uses their strengths like: personal attention, listening, sharing local buzz, community interaction and other things that are inherently more personal in nature. Things big box business weens out.

This is the power of local business marketing - and it is also the driving force behind social media sharing. We have seen local biz have success with video, twitter and review sites because it is a natural extension of community. I hope we will see more local businesses using these conduits to connect online - because lord knows they can use the economic recovery!
great job guys!

Thanks for the article. Definitely helped me with some insights.

123 Matrimonials

This article was good because it shows how you can use SM sites to your advantage, as well as how it will and will not affect your SEO efforts. Nice!

I haven't got benefits from this ways

Social media is necessary in any SEO campaign nowadays.

There is an SEO use for Facebook and it is much more simple than the analysis above has returned. Traffic Generation! Games and Applications can direct customers to your site as a simple link out of facebook or in a more complex form submission mannor. Also, I have seen excellent examples of facebook applications used as "teasers" that finish with the message "if you like this check out more on our site"

Although I have had a website up and running for over three years now I am just learning about social networking.

I have a question I hope to get answered before I get too deep into signing up on various sites. I would like to know the advantage of inviting someone to be your "friend". Or why I would accept an invitation to become someone's friend. I just do not understand what all that is about.

Thanks!

this issue is very complex.
IMHO in small scale SEM nofollow links can be the real added value that make your site appear very high in SERPs.
TBH I have to say also that being an italian SEO, I often face low semantical competition environments in which you may just need a bunch of backlinks to rank high.
anyway, I agree with Jow White in the sense that nofollow tags, though not passing pagerank, are still evaluated by serach engine spiders in order to rank the page.
from a stict traditional marketing perspective, I think that often big budgets invested in high competition SEO activities, earn low revenues, while, in well blended proportions, they can be one of the most valuable parts of a marketing and branding strategy.
very good article indeed

this may have a knock on effect but no direct effect

SM make it easy to get more traffic and thus new readers for the website and maybe someone got interested and go through linking back. So it's great for socializing the content and make your site/blog more familiar among readers. Nevertheless, it's not that jucy in case we talked about the no-follow tag which plays important role in pageranking via linking back.

There is no competition between the marketing aspect, twitter provides an excellent way of pointing your followers to your blog / site etc.

Facebook allows / provides communication between users via much more comprehensive search facility. i.e you can find old friends distant relations etc.

It's a redundant argument unless you are SEOing a massive client with broad brand recognition. Nofollow links, of small value at best, are not going to get you results. Bloggers are not going to start posting about Fred's Milkbar because it's not of interest.

A social networking campaign relating to kmart or Greenpeace might hold some SEO value, but it is too time consuming to take the gamble for a smaller client. Your time and their money can be better spent in numerous other areas.

Just for the record, I was not trying to say that links FROM social media sites are good for links...they are not. They are just the distribution point to get in front of people that will link to you.

My gameplan is as such:
1. Have some content that is great (and I don't mean like - you made it good, I mean like your mom sends it to you in a mass chain email without knowing you created it great).
2. Get it initial distribution on digg, delicious, stumbleupon and reddit.. This is the sites I mean when I refer to social media, in the same way I say search engines when I generally mean google.
3. Get links from some of the thousands and thousands of people who saw it on these sites. I am looking for links from bloggers, and people who still link to fun or valuable resources.

In summary, you have to actually CREATE a fun and valuable resource first, which is the truly hard part that most people won't do. THEN you distribute that content via social media, which IN TURN gets you links from other places.

There are no shortcuts. The second tier social media folks will have the same ultimate fate as second tier SEOs, and will be back to scraping by for a few bucks in two more years when the hype settles down. Those that did it right will have defensible web properties with thousands of links that others can't buy or beg for, and a nice passive income stream from them.

Social media is just another tool in the arsenal. There are really no gurus - only people that use it effectively, and people that don't, and past performance doesn't dictate future success.

Hi there peeps,

I think the comment by Todd is misleading as most social media sites have no follow so I don’t see how he thinks it can be used for link juice.

Social media sites are good for maintaining or destroying a sites reputation or for getting an increase in traffic.