Some interesting observations and I think you’ve mentioned a point that I failed to pick up on which is “brand awareness”. I agree entirely that the social media is an excellent route to get your brand out there and bigger brands certainly cannot afford not to be there. I’ll confess to not being that active in ocial media and perhaps its something that I should focus more on. The only reason I haven’t is because I’m not sure where it would benefit a small / niche content site. Perhaps thats my ignorance of new marketing techniques showing through? Perhaps thats why I’m not an SEO expert

I think that I fit into the small business category and heres where the crunch comes. With little time and resources where should I be concentrating for the greatest return on investment? Organic seo, ppc or social media… as always the balance is a hard one to find!

Social media is like you say “social” and there is no doubt that it is being utilised greatly by many marketers, but I do not agree that because it is “social media” that it cannot be used to stay connected with your customers.

As a website owner, you need to give people as many options as possible in order to stay connected and receive further information on your company or business. Sites like twitter and facebook provide marketers with extra channels that can help to drive more traffic to their sites.

Many major brands are now using social media very effectively to give their brands more exposure. Organic SEO is great and can provide a lot of traffic if done correctly, but by not focusing on the BIG picture, you deprive your business of other channels to help bring in even more traffic.

I would agree that the effectiveness of any social media campaign is based on what you have to offer. The basis is always great content and without great content your sites is just like millions of others out there floating around gathering dust.

Another thing to bear in mind is that just because you have great content does not mean people will link to it. Unless you are active in getting out there and promoting it via organic SEO, PPC or social media, your content although it maybe “remarkable”, may not get linked to or shared.

Thanks for your comments.

So where does social media fit in?

If you want to send a pretty picture, funny video or say “hey, look at this”. To be perfectly honest if someone is selling a product or service then its not quantity of passing traffic that matters but instead quality of traffic. eg I sell cars so I want people looking to buy a car visiting my site, not a group of guys all talking about the new colour range available in the photo I’ve added to my site.

IMO, if you have a game, funny picture blog, leisure activity then social marketing is great but if you’re serious about business the traffic you’ll get is little more than an added bandwidth expense. Think of it this way, social media is for sociable activities. You go to the bank for financial advice and you go and play football with your friends, not the other way around!

provides great unique, interesting and ground breaking content

In my experience it doesn’t have to even be groundbreaking. It can have been done before but if you presently clearly a focussed theme or niche in a unique manner you’ll suddenly find people linking to and consulting you about your sites theme. These are the links that count and lets be completly honest:

If you’ve built a useful site 90% of your links will be generated by others wanting to link to you!